


L Words

by MyEvilTwin (ProtoNeoRomantic)



Series: Blood Screaming [6]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Episode: s02e19 I Only Have Eyes For You, F/F, F/M, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, Ghost Sex, Ghosts, Guilt, Infidelity, Law, Lesbian Sex, Lies, Longing, Loss, Loss of Control, Loss of Virginity, Love, Lover's Quarrel, Loyalty, Lust, M/M, Magic Made Them Do It, Mutual Masturbation, Mutual Non-Con, Mutually Unrequited, Older Man/Younger Woman, Older Woman/Younger Man, Oral Sex, Other, Poltergeists, Possession, Racist Vampires, Rumors, Sadie Hawkins Dance, Secret Relationship, Secrets, Unrequited Love, Unrequited Lust, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Virgin Sacrifice, Werewolves, femmeslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 03:56:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1331002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/MyEvilTwin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Questions of Love, Loss and Loyalty plague the slayer set.  And the vampires aren't the only ones dancing on the line between Law and Chaos.  Neither are the ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Where there's a Wil...

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Lady's Choice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1223416) by [ProtoNeoRomantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic). 



> Set during the same little stretch of linear time as BtVS S2E19 "I Only Have Eyes for You." and the first several chapters of Lady's Choice Part Two, "What We Make".
> 
> For more information on Canon Compliance/Divergence and Story Mechanics and Themes, see series description.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Willow and Amy have a plan for visiting Xander and Oz in the hospital. But first Amy has to teach Willow how to play doctor. Hank takes Buffy to the hospital to see Giles.

Sunnydale, CA. March 3, 1998

 

“I don’t know,” Willow said worriedly. “This spell is starting to sound awfully… personal.”

“Magic, gets that way sometimes,” Amy said, somehow both grimly and encouragingly.

“But is this really even necessary?” she fretted.

“Yes,” Amy assured her, “it is. I could use a glamour, but then if we get separated, even by a few feet, perceptive people would start to see through it. This is much more dependable. Everyone will really see it, because it’ll really be real.”

“That’s what freaks me out about it,” Willow whined miserably. “I mean, it’s not the being a, you know…”

“Guy?” Amy said.

Willow nodded. “It’s the having a…”

“Penis?” Willow nodded again, coloring deeply. It wasn’t normally a word she had trouble saying, at least not alone in a room with another girl.

“The whole idea just seems so...unnatural,” Willow tried to explain.

“It is unnatural,” Amy pointed out patiently, amused, “That’s why they call it magic.”

“No,” Willow tried again to explain, “I mean how do people walk around with their... attributes dangling all over the place. It’s embarrassing even to think about.”

“I guess they get used to it,” Amy suggested philosophically. “Anyway, do you want to see the guys in the hospital or don’t you? I mean, you said it yourself, it’s the perfect disguise.”

Willow sighed. “I do,” she said, “but when I see them I want them to see me.” But even as she said it, she knew Amy was right, as usual. Amy was her last legal connection to Sunnydale High. If word got back to her mother that she had been seen visiting the members of Buffy’s inner circle, she wouldn’t even be allowed that.“Alright,” she said resolutely, “I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I just want to look in on Mom one more time before we… do it. The spell I mean!” She blurted out, blushing. “I want to check on Mom before we do the spell.”

“Will you relax?” said Amy dismissively, “It’s just a Needle’s Eye Sleeping Spell. I use it on my dad all the time. It’s nothing.”

“Yeah,” Willow laughed nervously, “It’s nothing.” But it didn’t feel like nothing.

“Just remember,” Amy explained reassuringly, “when you want her to wake up, you kiss her on the forehead, or the cheek, doesn’t matter, and you say...”

“Dear mother of mine, come back to me,” Willow recited dutifully.

“Exactly. See, what could go wrong?”

“You want that alphabetically or by order of magnitude?” she said, attempting levity.

“Come on,” Amy cajoled, “you’ve been talking about how much you want to do this for a week. This is the first day we’ve been alone in the house without that creepy Rabbi hanging around all the time, and it’s the last day too, because starting tomorrow you’ll be stuck over at Kent Prep until five o’clock every day.”

“You’re right,” said Willow resolutely. “It’s now or never. Should we do it _here_?” she added, quite a bit more doubtfully, indicating with her eyes the sacred circle drawn in bright red lipstick on the kitchen floor. There was a little truncated cross drawn underneath it and an arrow sticking up from it at an angle, a unified symbol of male and female.

Amy crinkled up her face doubtfully. “For the first part,” she said, “I think maybe we should use the recliner.”

“But, that’s my dad’s chair,” Willow objected, dismayed.

“We’ll put a quilt over it,” Amy said grudgingly, growing impatient. “Oh, for gods’ sakes,” she said, when Willow continued to look conflicted. “It’s not _sex_ ; it’s magic! It’s no worse than having a pelvic exam.”

Willow scrunch up her face. “Gee,” she said bleakly, “It sounds so much better when you say it that way(!)” But she shucked off her pants and underwear and laid down on the recliner.

Amy took up her spell book and read aloud once more: “Once you have extracted the cosmic essence of the genetic material in accordance with the instructions on page 17—which is what we did with Ira’s dandruff last night—apply the resulting ointment directly to the victim’s vaginal walls and rub in thoroughly. Do not used gloves or any other barriers as skin to skin contact is essential for the spell to work properly.” Willow made a pained face, embarrassed by how ‘embarrassed’ she was feeling.

“Um…” this is going to be kind of hard to do with your legs crossed like that,” Amy pointed out. Willow uncrossed, but didn’t unclench. “Come on,” Amy said, getting impatient again, “Open up. Wider than that.” Willow spread her legs not quite to Gyno-stirrup width, but close. Amy decided it was good enough. “Just… close your eyes and pretend I’m a doctor,” Amy advised.

Willow nodded, apprehension competing with a guiltier kind of excitement. Then, she shifted uncomfortably again. “ _Oh_!” she cried as a misplaced bit of comprehension struck her.

“I haven’t even touched you!” Amy complained, misunderstanding.

“No, not…that” Willow mumbled, mortified, “I just… think I figured out... something I might have missed out on… a while… back. Never mind. It’s not important. Just… go on with the spell.”

“Just _relax_ ,” Amy said for the millionth time. Then she slid two ointment slicked fingers inside Willow’s vagina and started to rub it thoroughly. Truth be told, it was pretty slick to start with. Amy tried not to read too much into that. Although she knew, of course, that they were supposed to get wetter as you got more excited, she wasn’t sure how wet or dry a vagina really ought to be in its resting state. Maybe hers wasn’t wet enough. Or maybe they were all different. She’d never actually touched anyone else’s before. She recognized the structures and the functions of the anatomy well enough though, more from books that anything. There was a particular little ruffle of pale pink flesh around three quarters of the edge of the vaginal opening, which she was careful not to damage. The intactness or not of the hymen, the outward visible sign, actually made a difference to some spells that required virginity, to others, not so much, but it was good to keep your options open as long as there was no compelling reason not to.

By dent of super-heroic effort, Willow managed not to move too much while Amy was inside of her. It wasn’t supposed to be a sexual act. But it was. A frustratingly incomplete one. Willow barely moved a muscle and Amy stopped as soon as the little daub of ointment was gone. Willow bit her lip and whimpered once, and then she was done. She bit her tongue and didn’t beg her not to stop, didn’t grab her or kiss her or put her hands down her pants or masturbate while she watched.

‘God! Please let her touch me like that again!’ Willow’s cunt screamed. ‘But she’s a girl!’A panicked voice in Willow’s mind called out. ‘Yes,’ said a much calmer, stronger voice, ‘exactly!’ That calm strong voice, the part of her that wasn’t scared, scared her more than anything. So Willow did what she usually did when she was scared of something that she didn’t understand and couldn’t control, she decided not to think about it. “Come on,” she said, getting hurriedly to her feet. “Let’s get in the sacred circle and get this over with.”

~~~~

Buffy walked the anti-septic white hallways of Sunnydale General Hospital on her way to Giles’ room, acutely, uncomfortably aware of her father at her side. She hoped he would give them a moment alone at some point, but she wouldn’t dare ask for it, just like she hadn’t dared to decline his suggestion to come here when he’d picked her up from school. After making such a big deal about it earlier, it would have been suspicious. She was still feeling pretty lucky that after she’d been patched up from her attack by the ‘Hospital Slasher’ nothing more had been said about her ‘psychiatric condition.’

Her father also hadn’t said anything else about her being probably pregnant, but she didn’t believe for a minute that he’d forgotten it. He was just waiting the next four days until Buffy actually missed her period so he knew for sure there was something to talk about, not that he could really have that much doubt. For one thing, although remembering not to ever let her stomach get completely empty helped a lot, she was still throwing up at least once a day. For another, she had started going to bed exhausted right after dinner every night.

Of course, he didn’t know that she was getting back up at one am to do a quick patrol before he got up around five. It kind of sucked having a parent who was both a night owl and an early bird after getting used to one who was neither. Two to seven a.m. was usually when Buffy got her best sleep. But Slaying was one more thing they had silently agreed not to talk about, and Hank’s abbreviated sleeping hours were her only real chance to sneak out.

Buffy put on what she hoped was a confident smile as she entered Giles’ room. “Hey,” she said by way of general greeting.

“Hey there, Buffy, Mr.—Ha—uh—Mr. Summer,” said Xander, “Check out the new and improved Giles.”

“Hank’s fine,” her dad said, seeming a little amused at Xander’s nervousness. Buffy was not amused, but she tried to ignore it, hoping it wasn’t a sign of continued interest in her. She couldn’t tell if Giles was amused or worried or what. His mouth looked annoyed, but his eyes were smiling. “Hello, Buffy,” he said and sat up a little against his pillows to offer her father his hand, smiling with what seemed to be a calculatedly appropriate degree of warmth. They exchanged names and ‘very-nice-to-meets-yous, having only seen each other at waving distance before.

Giles was cool as a cucumber he was guiltily pleased to note, playing his part perfectly. But then, he had deceived women’s fathers before. Evidently it wasn’t a skill you forgot after a couple of decades.

“Ah,” Buffy was saying, “no more nose thingy, very becoming.”

“Yes,” Giles agreed, “now if I could just get these bloody bandages off of my head, I really would feel like a new man.”

“One step at a time,” interjected a portly young nurse as she came in to take his vital signs yet again.

“Is this really necessary?” he complained. It was almost as if his father had sent her to replace Roberta, but he really didn’t think so. It wasn’t like Andrew to do anything so obvious.

“It is if you want me to tell Dr. Heigel you’re ready to go home tonight,” said the nurse cheerfully.

“I don’t see why such a fuss has the be made just because of—”

“— double pneumonia, a massive concussion, and a slashed throat?” Buffy concluded.

“None of which I have any more,” Giles pointed out.

“You still have the cracked skull,” The nurse chimed in cheerfully as she went on about her work, smiling benignly.

“So,” Buffy asked Xander when she was gone at last, “is your mom around?”

“No,” he informed her, “she actually relaxed a tiny bit as soon as the whole flu thing was over. She’s home driving Dad crazy now. I’m trying to enjoy it while I can. They’re making me go home tomorrow.” Damn. Buffy had really been hoping for someone to pester her dad so she could talk to Giles semi-privately for a minute anyway, at least give him a chance to squeeze her hand or do something to show that he hadn’t just been delirious when he’d said he loved her for the second Friday night in a row.

“There you are,” whined a permanently forlorn, slightly offended voice, almost as if in answer to a prayer. Jessica Harris poked her head into the room and looked miserably at her son. “I wondered where you were hiding to avoid me this time.”

Xander shook his head and emitted a surprisingly harsh sigh, “I’m not avoiding you, Ma,”he said, patiently-impatiently as if for the millionth time.

“Of course not,” said Jessica, unconvincing, unconvinced, wounded but baring up bravely. Buffy could never decide if she was actually that riddled with insecurity or just a really low key drama queen who’d found a sneaky and effective way to get attention. The topic she chose to bring up next, in front of two of Xander’s friends and one almost total stranger helped clarify that a little.

“What’s this I hear about you not going to the Sadie Hawkins Dance on Friday?” Xander stared at her in disbelief, somewhere between speechless with embarrassment and unable to get a word in edgewise. “I asked Cordelia why she hadn’t asked you yet and do you know what she told me! She told me she’s boycotting! I mean! Apparently she thinks she’s too good to have to ask you out!”

“She _is_ too good to have to ask me out,” Xander pointed out smiling, trying to laugh it off. Jessica was not amused. “I’m not even going to feel like dancing by Friday,” he argued with her gently, “Anyway,” he added, “why do we have to talk about it here?”

“Oh,” said Jessica, climbing on the cross again, “I’m sorry I embarrass you so much. It must be terrible to have a mother who had to _ask_ for her first date when you’re seeing a girl who’s too good for that! And also too good to set foot in my house, apparently! I’m so glad you’ve risen above your pitiful beginnings!”

“Erm… fascinating as this is,” Giles said thinly, both annoyed with and embarrassed for them, “Now that you’ve found each other, wouldn’t you rather visit in your own room?”

Xander opened his mouth to agree, but Jessica managed to speak first. “Not if _that boy_ is going to be there!” She declared indignantly.

“He’s not making fun of you, Ma!” Xander said, not loud but exasperated and with a sense that he was yet again repeating what he’d said before. “Oz is like that with everybody! And anyways he went home last night.”

“Don’t shout at me Alexander Gramble Harris!” Jessica shouted. Xander winced almost as if he’d been struck. Giles and Hank exchanged a look of mild horror. The verdict was unanimous. Xander hadn’t been kidding when he’d told Buffy he could never tell her his middle name and that whatever she was imagining couldn’t possibly be any worse. If his name had made the slightest bit of sense, it would have been just to the stuffy side of dorky. As it was, it was a monument of rhymeless, reasonless stupidity. It left you guessing whether it was illiterately mistranscribed or coined deliberately, and wondering which was worse.

Jessica was by no means cowed by the appalled silence. She leapt into it and kept swinging like a fighter who had deliberately created an opening and was prepared to take advantage of it. Exactly like. “I bet Miss Too-Good would sure be surprised if someone else took you to that dance!” she declared, suddenly leveling a challenging look at Buffy.

“Ma,” Xander started again, with further strained patience, “I don’t think—”

“Well, she’s certainly not ‘too good’ to ask my son out, is she?” Jessica demanded rhetorically. “She could certainly do a lot worse! Well, obviously.”

Buffy was stunned. Hank looked as though he was about to say something, but Giles beat him to it. “Good God, Woman!” he demanded, “Do you actually hear the words that come out of your mouth or do you just perceive them as a continual white noise?”

“Are you going let him talk to your mother like that?” Jessica demanded of her son.

“No, Ma, of course not,” he said, throwing sheepish, apologetic looks around the room. “Let’s get out of here!” They stormed out, she indignant and he dutifully pretending to be so.

Jessica stayed in a huff all the way down the hallway. Xander braced himself for the shouting. Mercifully, when she slammed open the door to his room, there were people there: Amy Madison and a tall, awkward looking red-headed guy he’d never seen before. “Where’s Oz,” the guy asked him, just like they’d known each other forever. Semi-invisible Sunnydale student? He was certainly dressed for the part in his baggy high-water khakis and oversized polo shirt made for someone a foot shorter, fifty pound fatter and thirty years older. He was in the right company too. Half the people who would even talk to Xander wouldn’t talk to Amy.

“You just missed him,” Xander said, standing to shake his hand, wanting to make them both feel welcome to stay for as long as possible. “He went home last night.”

“Oh, shoot!” the guy pouted, his manor though not his voice somehow vaguely feminine, deliberately, Xander assumed at first, in jest. But the boy held on a little too long to his hand and looked a little too deeply into his eyes when he said, “I was hoping to see both of you at once.” Xander tried not to feel creeped. He knew that he wasn’t _supposed_ to feel creeped by a gay guy touching his hand, or looking in his eyes, and usually he wasn’t. But the intensity and at-the-same-timeness of the touching and the looking made him feel desired, longed for, _hungered_ for and therefore creeped.

“Listen, you’re not a friend of Larry’s are you?” Xander stammered. He felt an intense defensive curiosity about whether there was a bulge in the front of this guy’s pants. He tried not to look. He looked. “Because I’m not—see he thinks—” The boy suddenly jerked his hand away and turned his face aside, blushing, embarrassed.

“ _Xander_ ,” Amy said with profound annoyance and baffling significance, “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize our old friend Willard!” Xander remained confused. Jessica pursed her lips wondering how all of this was a laugh at her expense. “You know,” Amy persisted, “that one very good friend that we _both_ have?” Willard smiled apologetically. Xander was suddenly so far beyond creeped. If he hadn’t been too shocked to breathe he might have screamed.

“Excuse me!” said Jessica, gravely offended at whatever she imagined the joke to be. “I have to get home and do all of the unimportant things I do!” She ran from the room wiping at her eyes dramatically. Xander hardly noticed.

“Zeus on Olympus!” he gasped when he could breathe again at last, “You’re Willow!”

“Shush! No! I’m Willard,” Willard hissed, reaching vaguely in his direction.

“Yeesh!” he said, jumping back about a foot.

“Xander,” said Willard, gently exacerbated, “It’s not contagious,”

“Wow,” said Xander, still in the process of freaking out, trying to focus on any aspect of the situation other than the fact that his best friend, who was clearly still totally in love with him, now had a dick and wanted to stick it up his ass. “You mean you guys, you, you actually...”

“Uh-huh,” Amy beamed proudly.

“See, Willow’s mom is being pretty much a b-i-t-c-h and won’t let her anywhere near any of you guys...” Willard started to explain.

“Holy Jesus,” Xander couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You mean you let this—you did this to yourself just so you could sneak out!”

“And see _you_ , since I won’t see you at school ever again!” Willard countered.

Xander was torn. “Alright, I get that I really do,” he said, “But magic is serious stuff. It’s dangerous. I mean this is some pretty basic stuff you guys are playing around with here!”

“Well” said Amy haughtily, “It’s not playing around if you know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, yeah,” Xander turned on her with biting sarcasm in his voice. “You know what you’re doing. A real pro. No danger there at all(!)”

“Excuse, you!” said Willard in a way that was oddly Cordeliaesque for someone who was both a guy and Willow, “Rude much? We did this to see you! And Oz! And anyway, Amy really does know what she’s doing. And she’s smart and funny and she could really help with the, you know, Scooby type stuff if you guys would give her a chance. And, and, most of the reason you’re mad at her is totally your fault, which is so not fair! And, and... I think I’m going to leave now and go see Oz cuz I bet he at least _wants_ to see me after all this time!”

“Right,” said Xander, “Sure. Oz wants to see you like _that_!”

“Oz isn’t shallow like that!” Willow argued. “He’s in love with my soul not just my physical presence! He can look past—!”

“Fine!” Xander interrupted “Go see Oz! Go look at him the way you just looked at me with your ‘physical presence’ dangling in his face. And when he breaks up with you, and it starts raining toads and someone tries to kill you with an ax, put me down for a big ‘I told you so’!”

“Maybe, Xander’s right,” Willard said worriedly as they made their way through the hospital parking lot towards Sheila’s Lexis, which they had ‘borrowed’ for the occasion. “Maybe I shouldn’t try to see Oz like this. I mean what if he gets all freaked out about my… thing the way Xander did? Especially if it starts acting up again. I mean, I didn’t tell it to do that! I don’t even have to be thinking about sex, I just see a guy I like—or a… and, and it all like, ‘hey, sex!’ Maybe I should just stick to calling Oz on the phone after Mom goes to bed until things… blow over a little.”

Amy actually had her doubts that the situation between Willow and her mother was ever going to blow over, but she didn’t want to say anything to upset her friend even more. She wanted to help, to make things better, and she had an idea how. “We can’t go home now,” she cajoled. “I mean, we went to a lot of trouble to set up this spell. If we don’t even stay out after six o’clock, what’s the point? We don’t _have_ to go see Oz. We could go to the Bronze!”

“Well…” said Willard, doubtfully, “I’m not really dressed for it.”

“No problem,” Amy declared, pulling a black leather handbag from under the passenger seat, “Look what I found!” Sheila’s purse, Willard realized. Amy rifled through it and quickly came up with a couple of credit cards. “I think,” she said enticingly, “that a whole new man deserves a whole new wardrobe.”

“Oh, I don’t know Amy...” Willard started to say, and then laughed out loud and grinned from ear to ear. “We might get in trouble!”

“Now that’s the spirit!” Amy grinned back.

“Say!” said Willard, “I think I’m a juvenile delinquent!”

“Yeah, ya are!” said Amy encouragingly, shoving the credit cards into his pockets.

Willard’s grin got wider and goofier. “So far,” he said, “I think I like it. It’s like... we can do whatever we want! We’re... above the law!”

Amy grinned wickedly patting her book bag on the seat beside her, “With these,” she said triumphantly, “we _are_ the law.”


	2. Do What You Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank confronts Giles, until he is forced to back off. Willow and Amy dance the night way, almost. Xander and Cordelia are so in love they have to fight about it. And then there are the evil things, which have plans. They have things to do.

“God, poor Xander!” Buffy said as soon as they were gone. “No wonder he lets Cordelia treat him that way.”

“It’s no worse than he treats her,” Giles pointed out. Buffy said nothing, because as much as she wanted to defend her friend, what Giles said was completely true. Xander came down on Cordelia constantly, making snarky little jokes at her expense (about her cruelty, her shallowness, her stupidity) in a way that Buffy would have never tolerated a guy doing to one of her girl friends. He’d only stopped calling her a slut after half the school figured out she was probably actually sleeping with him. Somehow, it had more or less seemed okay, because it was Cordelia. Not so much because three out of four of those things happened to be true as because it was easy to figure she could handle it.

“People do what they know,” Hank said with a shrug of total indifference. Buffy’s friends were strangers to him. “They are what they come from.”

“That’s a depressing thought,” Giles said. In fact, he seemed honestly disturbed by the idea. Buffy didn’t like it much herself. Especially coming from the Los Angeles County door slamming and screaming champion for 1990-96 inclusive.

“On the plus side,” Buffy said, when everyone had been quiet for much too long, “he probably has a very bright future as a standup comedian.” Giles’ eyes crinkled slightly in amusement, giving his entire expression a sudden warmth and particular Gilesiness that made Buffy’s heart leap unexpectedly. She colored slightly, even though she hadn’t actually done or said anything. It was still a shock and a delight and a something a lot more complicated and confusing every time she ran smack into the fact of how he could suddenly make her feel just by being Giles.

He noticed, returning a similar sort of miserable about being so pleased look back at her. If Hank noticed, he didn’t give any indication. Giles cleared his throat, which wasn’t all that suspicious considering he was just getting over pneumonia, and started cleaning his glasses as he spoke rapidly, making a joke about history and its repetitions that was only very vaguely related to what her dad had just said. Hank laughed politely.

On the subject of where people come from and how it defines them, Giles almost told a joke he’d told two dozen times to his adult friends, back when he’d had any, about modern Germany and the 1940 Berlin Party Conference. He thought better of it, remembering that Hank’s mother had actually been a participant in that orgy, whether or not he knew it. He also didn’t suppose he ought to be making what was, to some degree, a sex joke in front of Buffy, at least not with her father there to know about it. Perhaps even less so if he hadn’t been, actually. He redirected his speech, changing the joke into something not nearly as funny or relevant but a good deal safer.

The atmosphere in the room remained uncomfortable. Giles wished to God he could get a moment alone with Buffy, not that he was entirely sure what would happen if he did. He needed to talk to her, to clarify their relationship or lack of same, to question her about the effectiveness of her belated anti-pregnancy treatment, to examine her, verbally or otherwise, for signs and portents of that potential disaster that he had read about in a pamphlet he’d nicked from the nurse’s station. And though he kept telling himself, over and over again that he wasn’t going to even if he had the chance, he desperately wanted to get his hands on her body.

Suddenly, he got the opposite of his wish in almost every possible way. Turning slightly green, Buffy hurriedly excused herself and ran for his bathroom. Giles rubbed his temples, not so much because he felt suddenly very strained, although he did, as because he didn’t want to look Hank in the eyes while they listened to Buffy retching. And then, he did look up, because he was embarrassed, ashamed not to. Hank was staring at him pointedly.

“Buffy’s pregnant,” Hank said matter-of-factly, waiting for a reaction. Giles was careful to keep his expression neutral as he tried to judge whether and how he could successfully lie or feign ignorance. He was in serious, ultimately perhaps even mortal danger, not from Hank Summers but from information which the man would have absolutely no motive to keep to himself. A term of years in an American prison, deportation, as horrid as those things would be, were the least of his worries. He was in danger of being disciplined by the Council.

Hank spoke when Giles didn’t. “She blamed that ‘Angel’ guy,” he said, “but I don’t believe her.”

Giles was grateful that Buffy had given him such a great tool with which to spread doubt, but he didn’t have to try all that hard to look displeased. “It hardly seems like something she would say if it weren’t true,” he pointed out. “I should think she would rather have named almost anyone else.”

“You think so?” Hank asked skeptically. There was a sort of low key challenge in his voice. “That’s what I thought too, at first.” He would have said more. His tone had been one of impending revelation. But then Buffy came back from the bathroom.

“Sorry about that,” she said into the tense atmosphere, with a nervous, apologetic scrunch of her face. She didn’t bother offering any explanation.

Giles and Hank continued to watch each other tensely. He was suspected, that much was clear. His only hope was for the matter to be disposed of quietly, without being brought to anyone’s attention. If the police or the school or anyone else investigated, even if their investigation found nothing conclusive, the Council would know. They would not blame Angelus. Neither did Hank. Deciding not to care that Buffy was listening, he went on with his revelation. “I believed her right up to the point that she faked that psychotic episode just to get up here and see you Friday night.”

Buffy’s mouth hung open. “Oh shit!” she said. The way she said it, the panicked way she looked from Hank to Giles and back again, it was as good as an admission, though she recovered quickly enough to create some ambiguity. “Dad, you can’t possibly think I would do it with _him_! He’s like forty or something! I’m sorry, but that’s just gross.” Giles didn’t know whether to try to look stricken or to try not to. He had to remind himself that that was what he needed her to say. It didn’t help to know that it was probably what she he really thought right up to the moment he proved her wrong by stripping her naked and fucking her.

Trying to find a more productive line of thought and thence perhaps action, he quickly cast his mind over what he knew of Hank Summers, who he was, what he came from. It was mostly dry, irrelevant detail, his place of birth, academic degrees, employment history. Mostly but not all. He was his mother’s son. He was a player of games, in some ways not unlike Giles’ own father, which didn’t mean he’d forgive anyone for trying to run a game on him, quite the opposite. Still when there is everything to gain and nothing to lose by trying….

“Mr. Summers,” he said, with great dignity and patience, as one who has a right to be offended and is graciously choosing not to exercise it, “I assure you that there is nothing between Buffy and I but affection and respect entirely appropriate to our roles as student and teacher. I quite understand your not wanting to believe that Angel is responsible for… well if she _is…_ ”

“Which we don’t even really know yet.” Buffy pointed out calmly, the unlikely voice of reason. Her calm helped Giles calm down as well, making Hank the irate odd man out.

“No,” he somehow screamed and pouted at the same time, petulant and sarcastic, “I’m sure you’ve had food poisoning for four days! That also explains why you look like you just got a boob job! And why you’re sleeping twelve hours a day! Jesus fucking Christ, you’re supposed to be a fucking teacher!”

“For God’s sake, sir!” Giles exhorted him, “Lower your voice before we get security mixed up in the middle of this! Have you any idea the seriousness of the crime of which you are threatening to accuse me? The consequences of merely being accused? And on what evidence? You can’t just go around destroying other people’s lives because you’re… upset!”

“Dad,” Buffy said, with urgent reasonableness, “It’s like I told you on Friday, I just wanted to _talk_ to Giles. Because I need help with all this and with Angel being involved, I though he deserved to know.”

Hank seemed far from convinced, but he was no longer confident enough in his accusations to keep screaming them in public. “So now he knows,” he said caustically. “Buffy, come on, we’re going home.”

~~~~

“God have mercy on a miserable sinner,” Rupert murmured, closing his eyes and lying back on his pillows. Watching Buffy walk out of his room, the way she looked at him, the way he could not help looking back at her, felt like watching her walk out of his life. He wanted to grab her, to stop her, to make love to her, to make promises to her, to keep her forever. But she was not walking out of his life. He would see her again in a day or two, and every day or almost every day thereafter. Until one day he wouldn’t. And every day, until that day, he would continue to make the same hard, painful choice, over and over again. Every day, he had to let her go.

He wondered how many days of this torment he could actually endure before it literally killed him. Experience suggested that, despite a deep gut feeling to the contrary, the true answer was probably an infinite number. Experience also tended to suggest that his feelings for Buffy would fade slowly over time, eventually amounting to nothing more than an occasional stab of regret. Once again, a feeling in his twisted, knotted guts said otherwise.

Rupert took a deep breath and let it out again, trying to send some of his anguish and confusion with it. When, only a week and a half ago, he and Buffy had confessed their lack romantic of love to one another, he’d thought she meant it, and he’d tried very hard to mean it too. Though there had been no denying the strong sexual feeling that persisted between them in the days that followed (especially when he was feeling her sexually) and though he had felt stirrings of a more poetic justification for the same, it had seemed like something that would pass.

But since the crash and the attack of Der Kendis Tod everything had changed. When he looked into Buffy’s eyes now, he knew that she wanted not only his cock but his whole self, heart, body and soul, and that she was willing to give him her whole self in return. And what a bargain that would be at any price! But he had no right to accept her sexual favors, let alone her love and loyalty and still to keep from her the secrets that he kept and must keep as a member of the Watcher’s Council.

“Why so glum, Chum,” asked Dr. Heigle cheerfully poking his head through the door.

Giles smiled ruefully, “wallowing in a morass of my own making, how are you?”

“Basking in the light of love and life as usual,” he responded without looking up from Giles’ chart. He seemed like he meant it too.

“Must be nice,” Giles mused.

“Well,” the doctor reminded him with cheerful indifference, “at least you’re going home tonight. Do you want me to release you to work tomorrow or keep you off through the end of the week?”

Giles sighed. Tomorrow was only Wednesday and he hated to miss so much work on general principles, but he just didn’t feel up facing Sunnydale High so soon, especially if Hank showed up to drop Buffy off and have a word with Snyder as he seemed so likely to do. “Do you think you could have me start back on Thursday?” he asked.

“Suit yourself,” said the doctor. And truthfully Giles was tempted to, damn the consequences.

~~~~

Drusilla smiled in the dark, sniffing the foul air. “Here we are dears,” she said silkily, lasciviously “home sweet home.” The large bundle cradled in her arms shivered with neither cold nor joy. She shushed it lovingly, like a fussy baby. The six tiny urchins she and Spike had sired just for sport clustered around her and clung to her skirts. None of the little vampire ‘family’ could see one another in the total darkness of that buried chamber, but they could hear one another’s trembling bones and chattering teeth and smell one another’s fear.

Some of the children whimpered. A pace behind Drusilla, at her right hand, Spike leaned on an iron stave he’d brought along for support and protection. He’d been up and about for a couple of days, but was not yet altogether steady on his feet or sure of his strength. “Are you sure this is where you want to be, pet?” he asked, the voice for all those who lacked Drusilla’s leave to be so bold.

“Yeah,” she said with relish. “There’s power here. I like the way it sings in my head. It makes my skin tingle.”

Besides Drusilla, none of them liked the power they felt here. Edwards, who knew the place best, liked it even less. Closing his eyes and opening his mind to the space around him, he walked to the nearest of the massive standing candelabras to light it, praying to he-knew-not-what to avoid stumbling over a cross in the darkness. The candles’ dim illumination filled the place with light and shadows. It revealed a tumbled maze of moldering oak and cracked marble. It danced eerily on the stagnant waters of the baptismal pool.

This place had changed little in the sixty-odd years since he’d first lain eye on it, but Edwards had changed a lot. Standing among the elite of the Master’s growing legions, he had had courage, confidence, clarity of purpose. He had been able, as Spike was able now, to put on a human face and a convincing bluff of relaxation. Now, he cringed behind his demonic features like the dickless cowards he had sneered at back then. All his grand ambitions were gone. His only goal was to keep his head above the waters of oblivion, to continue to exist another year, another day, another hour.

It was the same for all but one of his companions, and no wonder. At the height of Spike’s reign, only ten weeks ago, there numbers had swelled to more than fifty, their greatest strength since the death of the Master. Now they were only eleven, even if you counted both the children and Angelus, which seemed dubious at best. To be honest, his Zanya hardly counted either in terms of strength. She sat huddled in Spike’s old wheelchair, staring vacantly into space with her one remaining eye, fingering herself and muttering in her native tongue. She was so badly burned that he could only tell her demon face from her human form by checking her teeth.

Not for the first time, it occurred to Edwards that his goal of self-preservation would be better served by abandoning his companions. Besides being the only adult of truly sound mind and body, _he_ wasn’t the one who’d gone and fucked the Slayer and killed her friends just to make her a personal enemy. But that would mean leaving Zanya, or accepting that she would always be as she was, which amounted to the same thing. She had been his three hundred years one way and another. She was the last thing on this Earth that truly was, his last connection to the boy and man he had once been. From the cradle to the grave, from warm breasts to dripping fangs, she was all he knew of lust and all he meant by love. Without her he was a wraith, a nameless shadow. So, here he would stay, cowering in this God infested place, serving the whims of a raving lunatic, praying to he-knew-not-what to let him just exist another day.

~~~~

“You mean like a guy guy?” Cordelia asked incredulously, leaning against Xander in the tiny hospital bed, brushing her fingers casually down his side, down his leg. “Like with a full set of equipment and everything?”

“You know,” said Xander agitatedly, shrugging her hand off, sorry he’d ever brought up the subject of Willow’s transformation. “It didn’t really occur to me to ask.”

“Well, what did it seem like?” Cordelia persisted, annoyed by his rejection of her caress.

Xander helplessly relived the moment ‘Willard’ had shaken his hand. “It _seemed_ like he had the total package, locked and loaded and a comprehensive plan of what to do with it, to me specifically, okay?” he admitted, testily. “The whole thing just kind of creeped me out. Anyway, the point is, it’s not natural. And Amy was all proud, just like beaming all over the place. Somebody has to tell her to cool it with this magic stuff before people start to get hurt.”

“Says the voice of very recent experience,” Cordelia pointed out coolly.

“Yeah, well, I’ve learned my lesson, and so should she,” Xander said. “I mean, I do not want Willow to be a guy when she looks at me like that!” Cordelia shifted, propping on her elbow the better to glare at him. “Uh, no, that’s not what I mean…” he stammered.

Cordelia raised an eyebrow and tilted her head dramatically to the side. “Oh my God,” she said, simultaneously amused and offended as only she could be. “You actually think Willow is still secretly pining over you, don’t you?”

“Well... yeah?” Xander admitted sure he had just sprung some kind of a trap.

“And she’s what... toying with Oz just to make you jealous?”

“No... I don’t think that... it’s just... I’m not available... so she’s just... you know...”

“Settling(!)” Cordelia concluded incredulously, not so much amused anymore. “For a cool, laconic musician who’s read almost as much she has, totally gets everything she says, _probably knows_ what a G-spot is and where and thinks she makes the world spin on its axis?”

“Yeah?”

“Open your eyes, Xander. Willow is in love with Oz. She’s totally over you. And from what you’ve just said, adjusting for your tendency to totally misread everything as being about you, she’s probably somewhere right now fucking Amy Madison. You’ve got even less of a shot with her than you have with Buffy. The only girl pining for your touch is me! I’m the one who loves you, Xander, and right now I have no idea why! I mean for God’s sake it’s been more than a week, I didn’t come here to talk about Willow Rosenberg’s dick! I came here to have sneaky, quiet hospital bed sex and now I don’t even know if I want to do that anymore!”

“Look, Cordy, I’m sorry,” Xander said, sitting up, trying not to think about Joyce’s limp body crumpling in his arm, his dripping dick falling from her, trying not to wonder what had happened to her, if she was dead or alive or… something else. “I… just don’t feel like doing it tonight, okay?” he mumbled guiltily.

“You know what?” Cordelia fumed, “that’s just _fine_. In fact? Don’t call me, and I _won’t_ call you!” She hurried out, Xander shouting after her to wait as she slammed the door.

~~~~

The Summers family ate in its usual tense silence. At least Hank, unlike Joyce, didn’t feel the need to try to fill it, which suited Buffy fine. There was nothing in her life, nothing that mattered, that she could talk to either of them about. Today had proved that pretty fucking convincingly if Friday night left any doubt. She certainly didn’t want to talk about whatever new whore he was fucking at work that his bitch secretary had to call and scream at him about. Buffy swallowed as much as she could stand to choke down, excused herself and headed up to her room to lie down. Despite her troubled heart, she slept. Because of it. She dreamed.

~~~~

“Will you relax,” Amy chided, trying to drag Willard out of the alcove at the front of the Bronze between the bathrooms and the telephones.

“I can’t,” Willard hissed, “There’s people we know in there, and you saw how Xander freaked out at the hospital, and I feel like a freak in these clothes ’cause even I think I look hot and you…” Willard swept Amy once with his eyes. She was Red Book beautiful in the new outfit she’d just convinced him to buy her and he looked like the cover of GQ. “I mean,” he tried frantically to explain, “Girls I know are going to _flirt_ with me and ... and this _thing_ has a mind of its own and... and...then, they’re gonna _know_! Somehow they’re gonna know and no one anywhere is ever going to talk to me again!”

“They’re _not_ gonna know,” Amy assured him. “And I am perfectly capable of protecting you from the mass of slavering girls who will want to fuck you the minute they see you in that outfit.” The way she said it, her voice velvety with sexual mischief and only a little irony, it was hard to tell if she was joking. He was all but sure she knew what she was doing, when she leaned into him, with both hands on his chest and whispered directly into his ear, “Just one dance, then if you still want to... we can go.” They stayed for more than one dance. They stayed even when Cordelia came in with Devon for a cup of coffee that could have been innocent but probably wasn’t. Of all the brain-dead beefsteaks she could have brought here tonight, it had to be the one who happened to be friends with Oz. But Amy didn’t let Willard even start to whine about leaving. She grabbed his ass and kissed him instead. Hungrily, he kissed her back and put his hands on her body. She pulled him onto the dance floor and they danced. They closed down the club, long after Cordelia and her fallback boy were gone. It was an amazing evening. Somehow, when Amy passed someone an ID, it magically passed inspection, and having a credible credit card was like a kind of magic all its own. But the best part was the way Amy held him while they danced, the way she kissed him, the way she looked into his eyes. By the time Willard floated into the parking lot at two am, his beautiful girl on his arm, he felt ten feet tall.

Then, suddenly, there it was, slamming him rudely back to Earth. Sheila’s car waited like a pumpkin coach to take him home to Willow’s messed up life. Not yet sensing this shift, still drunk with passion, Amy threw her arms around Willard and kissed him hard on the lips. They stumbled against the Lexis. Despite a wave of inner turmoil, he kissed her back. The kiss deepened. Tongues were involved, guilty, meaty, delicious body parts inside each other’s bodies. It seemed like a concept with potential for further development. Amy put her hands on Willard’s ass. He put his hands on hers. He slid them under her skirt. He could feel her underpants wanting to be pulled down. The thing with a mind of its own approved. It was hard and bulging, begging to be let out of his now painfully tight pants and thrust into something even tighter. He wanted her, he really did. But it was no good.“Amy,” he said apologetically, moving his hands back around to her waist and setting her back on her feet, “we can’t.”

“Sure we can,” she cajoled, rubbing herself against his hard cock like a cat on a scratching post, “we can do whatever we want.”

“But...Oz...”

“...will never know.”

“But I’ll know,” Willard pointed out with the heartbreaking, innocent piety of a good little Jewish girl. Amy rolled her eyes and got in the car. So much for being above the law.


	3. To Reason Why

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sex does more than preaching can to justify God's ways to man. But not nearly enough. Buffy and Giles lie together in her bed.

_Buffy was wearing her white dress again. She was soaked to the skin from being baptized, cleansed, held under, drowned, washed away. The church was as dark and dank as ever, but no one else seemed to mind. Weird shadows danced in the scant candle light. Distorted faces leapt leeringly between deep gloom and true darkness, pulling at her with their eyes. Her father, Hank Summers, was at her side, smiling and laughing, talking on his cell phone. Giles stood at the front of the church, next to the altar, beaming back down the aisle at her. His intense, smoldering eyes, contrasted with his warm easy smile in a way that only she seemed to be able to see, making her naked, but only to him, peeling away the damp layers of her dress like the petals of a flower, exposing her wet, green center to his eyes only._

_The music started and at last she began walking up the aisle towards her destiny. But then the bundle of flowers in her arms began to cry. There was a murmur of disapproval from absolutely everyone as she tugged one swollen breast from her sodden bodice and tried frantically to interest her disdainful child in suckling. Hank apologized to everyone on his conference call for his daughter’s rudeness._

“ _Honestly,” Buffy heard Mrs. Harris saying to her son in a loud stage whisper, “I don’t know what you ever saw in that slut.”_

“ _Well that’s no secret!” Her husband shouted back drunkenly, making the universal hand gesture for ‘huge tits.’ Xander ignored them. He and Joyce were rolling on the floor, hidden by the merciful darkness, having loud, enthusiastic sex._

_At last, Buffy reached the front of the church. The flowers stopped crying when she handed them to Cordelia. “Oh please!” the queen bitch said disdainfully, turning her back to the sanctuary and tossing the bouquet over her shoulder. Willow blushed and beamed as it landed in her arms._

“ _I don’t know,” said Oz skeptically, “I’ve never really seen rats that color before.” But Amy assured her that they were beautiful. She kissed Willow long and passionately. As they groped and undressed one another Oz shrugged nonchalantly, became a large white wolf and with his new mate ate them both and all their progeny. No one seemed to mind that either._

_Giles took Buffy’s right hand in both of his. He lifted it to his lips and gave it a gentle kiss that sent shivers through every nerve in her body, like phantom hands caressing and stroking her inside and out, leaving every inch of her skin, every particle of the lining of her mouth and throat and cunt hungry for his warm, solid physical touch. “Please don’t stop touching me!” Buffy gasped, her knees giving way. Giles and Hank nodded the terms of some unspoken agreement. Each keeping a firm grip on one hand and arm, they supported her upright to the altar and gently laid her down on it._

_Hank handed Giles a Gothic looking sword, the kind where the hilt makes a giant cross. Then he ripped the front of Buffy’s dress open and stared down at her exposed body with detached appreciation as Giles held the sword aloft, poised above her breast. “It’s been done this way for a dozen centuries,” Giles explained. His tone was only mildly apologetic._

“ _Have you the ring?”the Master asked from the pulpit. Buffy held up her fist to show him that she was already wearing it, with the heart pointed towards her, her ring finger turning from purple to black as it grew ever tighter, biting into her flesh._

“ _Then if none here knows of any just cause—” the Master continued._

“ _Stop!”Angel demanded, standing and advancing up the aisle. “A person just doesn’t wake up one day and stop loving somebody!” He cocked his gun and trained it on Buffy’s heart. “Love is forever!”_

Buffy sat bolt upright, drenched in sweat, but she managed to swallow the scream that was caught in her throat. For a panicked instant she thought she heard a second gunshot, but by the time that she processed the fact the first had been part of her dream, she realized someone was throwing rocks against her window, inexpertly, too hard, too close. She opened the pane and almost laughed at the sight of Giles, sitting in a tree.

When she saw how desperate he looked, she didn’t laugh. “Get in here,” she hissed instead, “before somebody sees you! What are you _doing_ here?” she demanded, still whispering, as he awkwardly maneuvered himself through the window as if he had more arms and legs than he knew what to do with. He was wearing a damned tweed suit with sneakers.

“I honestly don’t know,” he admitted, “making a fool of myself probably, but I had to see you.” He took her in his arms so quickly and held her so tightly that it startled her.“I couldn’t leave things the way we left them at the hospital,” he explained ardently, kissing her face and neck, “not for another day, not for another minute, Buffy I need you, I’ll always need you,” his hands began to roam, to trace the contours of her body. “I don’t know how this is ever possibly going to work out to anything other than a complete disaster, but I love you! I’m in love with you and I want us to be together!” he declared with quiet passion. He kissed her deeply and for a moment she kissed him back. She could feel her heart melting and her cunt tingling, way beyond ready to make love/get fucked.

“Hey!” she hissed accusingly, with sudden revelation, taking a long step back, “You’re here for sex!”

He blinked at her puzzled. “Well…” he admitted, becoming embarrassed, “I suppose… partly. Isn’t that what you want?”

“No!” she snapped, then, “I mean yes, I mean… oh,” she whined, near tears, “I don’t know what I mean, I just, I just don’t know,” she was crying now. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.” Stunned, Giles put his arms around her like a father, like a mother, while she sobbed against his chest. Like a child.

After a while, they sat down on her bed and she told him about her dreams, and then he showed her the real reason why he had come.

~~~~

He had meant to drive Amy home. Really he had. So what were they doing on his—on Willow’s—bed, pulling each other’s clothes off, groping each other’s bodies. He rubbed the wonderful folds of Amy’s twat with his fingers and then slid two of them inside of her, wishing he could feel her do the exact same thing to him again. But he didn’t have the equipment for that right now. Not that she ever would have touched it in a million years if it wasn’t for some ‘good reason’ like a spell.

For one very short moment Willard felt lost and profoundly sad. But Amy’s gently enthused hands caressing his cock and balls quickly took his mind off his troubles, leaving him blissfully incapable of escaping the moment and having abstract thoughts. Electricity skipped and jumped along the awkwardly completed circuit of hands and genitals. There was no one else in the world now. The world was no bigger than the bed. Smaller. There was no room for two separate persons. Willard climbed on top of Amy and pushed his penis inside her. They became one creature, a universe unto itself. The universe was a turmoil of volcanic motion.

The universe exploded in a supernova. Either that or Willard had an orgasm. Okay, probably that last one. He was still lying on top of Amy. Less than five minutes had passed. His _thing_ was still inside her, dripping seamen and regret. They were two creatures again.

“Alright,” he said, rolling off of her, suddenly angry and disgusted with himself. _Past reason hated, like a swallowed bait/On purpose laid to make the taker mad._ “I did what you wanted. Now change me back.”

~~~~

“A pregnancy test?” Buffy asked skeptically, looking at the box he had handed her. “You climbed up a tree and snuk in my window in the middle of the night to give me a pregnancy test? They have these at the nurse’s office.”

“Well, clearly, I also had a strong desire, which I hadn’t quite admitted to myself, to be in your room in the middle of the night,” he conceded apologetically.

Buffy stared at the test kit in her hands, and thought of the one she had already taken that very morning. She’d snuk into the school nurse’s office, shoved it in her purse and hidden in a stall in the girls room to read the instructions, which told her that it was frankly a little early to test, that two lines would mean she was pregnant, while one line would mean almost nothing.

The instructions had also said to lay the thing on the counter when you were done and come back to look at it in five minutes, but that soooo wasn’t going to happen. Instead, she had sat and held it, watching the lines develop like an abstract version of a Polaroid, telling herself that it didn’t matter how early it was, that at least it _might_ confirm what she already knew, _might_ tell her where she stood. She had had to consciously resist the temptation to shake it to make it go faster, especially when the first line was fully formed and there was not even an ambiguous hint of a second.

Buffy had been so shocked she’d almost dropped the test stick on the floor. She hadn’t felt the least bit relieved, and not just because she knew it was still early to get her hopes up. That negative test hadn’t created any danger of getting her hopes up. Instead, she’d been suddenly, bitterly disappointed.  ‘Nope, not for you,’ the Universe seemed to be saying yet again. ‘Buffy gives all, Buffy gets nothing.’

She thought of the things she’d read in the Watcher diaries, a page here and a page there, alone in the library while Giles was busy doing other things. She hadn’t told anyone, not even Willow, even though Willow was the one who had given her the idea to start looking through them in the first place, back when she had still thought she wanted to know everything she could find out about Angel. She hadn’t even admitted to herself the significance of what she’d read, or rather what she hadn’t read. Things like, ‘my Slayer got engaged last night,’ or ‘today was my Slayer’s thirtieth birthday.’ Watchers didn’t write things like that very much. Because they didn’t happen.

Buffy had used to joke that she might have children someday, when she was done having a life. The truth was, she was probably going to get done with her life pretty quickly. The truth was, that if she wasn’t pregnant now, it would probably be just one more item in the ledger of her life in the very long column headed, ‘never.’

Buffy had actually found that she was comforting herself, reassuring herself, with the thought that it had really been too early to test after all, that she still might be pregnant. It wasn’t as if she felt fantastic about the idea. It wasn’t as if she weren’t scared. It wasn’t like she didn’t know it would cause huge and serious problems for her to be pregnant, by Giles, right now. But she couldn’t help feeling more hope than fear.

An idea had lodged itself in her mind and wouldn’t be shaken loose: If she had a child, at last there would be something _real_ , something that _mattered_ in her life besides what she had been chosen to do, something she had chosen. If she were pregnant, if fate had dropped that kind of a choice in her lap, then for the first time in a long time, her future, or at least the most important part of it, would be entirely in her hands. She would have the power, if she wanted to, to bring to life an entirely new individual human person. In a way, she’d be choosing the past, as well as the future. The difference between making love and making a mistake would be hers to determine. Her child, Giles’ child, would be the product of their love, the proof, the validation of it.

And it would be true, forever.

And just like that, the choice had been made, in advance, contingent only on fate’s cooperation, as everything always was. Life was too short. Buffy might or might not ever have a child, but she wasn’t having an abortion. She wasn’t fooling herself that there was a someday out there that might be better. And because of that, with Giles sitting right in front of her, pitifully, desperately longing for it not to be true, she couldn’t tell him that deep in her guts, in her heart of hearts, she already knew that she was having his baby, and she was glad.

“I’m not pregnant,” she said instead. “I took a test this morning, and it was negative. I just didn’t tell Dad yet because I stole it. I’m waiting for him to buy me one.”

“Well but how many days is it until… I mean how accurate is it likely to be at this point?” He asked, hope creeping insufferably into his voice.

“99% accurate,” Buffy lied, “Four days sooner.”

“Really?” Giles seemed near swooning with gratitude, “Good Lord, that’s a relief! Why didn’t you tell me that a half an hour ago?”

“Because!” Buffy said, then spent much too long a moment straining for something to say next. Her eyes filled up with tears. He pulled her into his arms again, stroking her hair, the warmth and strength of his body speaking of passion and concern. “Because,” she whispered tearfully against his neck, “It feels like the end of everything. And I don’t want it to be over.”

Giles tucked her head under his chin and made a noise somewhere between laughing and crying. “Silly girl!” he said, “Don’t think for a minute that either of us is getting out of this that easily!” He hugged her close then backed off just far enough to turn his head and kiss her. Buffy felt a surge of desire as he slid his tongue inside her mouth and they drank each other in like water.

She also felt a surge of guilty knowing that she was lying to him about such a basic vital thing as not being pregnant, but there was nothing she could do about it that wouldn’t lead to fighting, and she didn’t want to fight right now. She needed Giles, needed to be with him, every bit as much as he clearly needed her. While they kept kissing, while his hands slid under her pajama top to squeeze her tingling, swelling breasts, she lay back on the bed and pulled him down on top of her.

Once again, while they caressed, they undressed one another. His jacket, tie and trousers, her pajamas and comfortable cotton underpants, were soon strewn about the bed and floor. She was naked first, he had more layers to contend with. Propping up on one elbow, he looked at her exposed body, viewing it carefully for the first time in relative tranquility, watching the moonlight trace the contours of her skin. When she spoiled the view by half sitting up to continue unbuttoning his shirt, he gently laid her down again. “Be still a moment,” he whispered. “Let me look at you. Dear God, you are beautiful!”

The moment passed. His eyes had feasted and his hands were starving. He touched her tight wet twat and it invited, implored, begged him to come in. He resisted, using his hands on her a while longer with gentle expertise. Buffy gasped and shuddered. She’d never been touched quite like that by any man’s hands before, slow and gentle and relentless and passionate. She went back to peeling clothing off his upper body just to have something to do with her own hands, which were being put out of a job, maybe permanently, by a more experienced and qualified candidate.

At last, the only fig leaf between them was a pair of drab gray, rather reinforced looking boxer-briefs, swollen and stretched to capacity by his enormous cock. Buffy slid her hand inside and squeezed and stroked him gently. “God I want this thing inside me!” she breathed against his neck. It was an invitation no mere mortal could refuse. He let her pull his shorts down around his knees and thrust his cock into her pussy with a sense of triumphant surrender to completeness, to wholeness and perfection. How could he have ever judged this beautiful act to be a flaw in the fabric of the universe? The universe was exactly as it should be.

“Buffy?” Hank shouted from the next room. Giles started and instinctively tried to sit up. There wasn’t room. He brained himself against a poster of sodding wildflowers affixed to the little slab of neither wall nor roof that overhung the bed. He made a startled noise of pain and only just managed not to curse aloud in what was, in this tiny American town, an incriminatingly uncommon dialect.

“I have a gun!” Hank shouted, “If you’re alright in there, you’d better tell me now!”

Pulling his hard cock out of Buffy’s sweet slot, still fighting the urge to curse, Giles pulled his shorts up and started frantically gathering his clothing. “There’s no time!” Buffy hissed, shoving him toward the window. “I’m fine Dad!” she called aloud.

“Angel, you son-of-a-bitch!” Hank shouted, “If you’re in there I’m gonna kill you!” His footfalls were heavy in the hallway. Buffy leapt to the door and locked it while Giles clambered awkwardly out of the window, his hands encumbered with a random assortment of his clothing.

“There’s no one in here!” Buffy shouted, frantically stuffing the rest of Giles clothes under her mattress while her father rattled the knob. He shouldered the door open just as she finished climbing back into her pajamas. He _saw_ her pulling the last piece on over her head. At least, he thought he saw her.

“Where is he!?!” Hank demanded. He did not have a gun, and he could have really used one. His eyes darted frantically around the room. The closet was open and shallow. The covers were messed in such a way at to make it clear no one was hiding underneath. The bed was too low to the floor for a grown man to squeeze under. Hank ran to the open window. Buffy darted to stand by his side, ready to have to explain. There was no one in sight.

“There’s no one here,” Buffy repeated. She stank of sweat and sex.

“I heard moaning,” Hank accused, “and the bed squeaking.”

“I was just…dreaming!” Buffy replied, exasperated. Hank looked at her in stark accusing disbelief. “Alright!” she admitted at last, “I was masturbating! And talking to myself and pretending I was in bed with a man because I’m lonely and horny and my life sucks and I am therefore utterly pathetic! God! Is that enough information! Are you satisfied officer! I didn’t mean to start an international panic!”

~~~~

Giles walked home feeling like an idiot.  A guilty, terrified idiot, wearing sneakers without socks and a suit and very loose tie without a shirt or an undershirt holding a large wooden cross in his hand that he usually kept in his pocket.  He needed a car very badly.

And that wasn’t the only thing he badly needed. He spent what was left of the night on a couch he was starting to hate, in an apartment he already hated, hating himself even more. If he was ever going to even try to get a good night’s sleep in this place again, he needed a new mattress, one that wasn’t stained with the vile semen of his bitterest enemy. 

But there was one thing even more important that he needed to do first. At the first light of dawn, he called a cab.

“And where are we going to on this fine day that the Lord hath made?” the driver asked cheerfully.

“Pleasant Hill Cemetery,” he answered levelly.

“No flowers?” the driver chided gently. “Man, we need to stop and get you some flowers.”

“No, sir” said Giles coldly, sharply, “We do not.” He vainly closed his eyes against the remembered sent of rich red roses laced with the anticipation of unacted desire. The joy he had felt at that moment, the sense of resolution, of recovery of love once lost.... He reached behind his glasses, shutting his eyes tighter and pinched the bridge of his nose, forcing back his tears.

“Hey man...” the driver yammered amiably, “I didn’t mean to upset you or anything... You know... what you need to do is just lift it up to the Lord, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“For God’s sake man!” Giles lashed out, losing his temper, “Do I look like I’m eager to have a friendly chat?! Why can’t anyone in this accursed country learn to mind his own Goddamned business?!”

“Hey, man,” said the driver, backing off in a tone that suggested his passenger was the one being irrational, “Don’t damn my God!’”

Giles sniffed indigently, “Do you have the slightest idea how much sense that doesn’t make?” he asked, then groaned miserably because it hurt his heart the way his own inside out sentence construction reminded him of Buffy. They made the rest of the journey in silence, which suited Giles perfectly. It was a bit awkward, however, when he realized he’d have to ask the man to wait. There was nothing out this way, no telephone to call another cab.

When he saw Jenny’s grave, he deeply regretted coming hear. He had come, he supposed, to feel her presence. Instead he felt her absence more keenly than ever. He wished he _had_ brought flowers. He wanted to lay something on her grave, to reach down and touch that fine and private place, which embraced his dearest love as he never had and never would.

He wished he had someone to explain all of this to, someone who could understand his pain and could comfort him, could rock him like a mother against her breast and give him solace. If only Buffy were here with him! He laughed out loud at that absurdity, wondering, but not caring what the driver would make of that. ‘Oh Jenny, I loved you so much that I knocked up a little blonde high school girl ten minutes after you died!’

“You know,” he declared to the bright, cold March sky, “I think Angel _must_ be one of yours! You have the same damned sense of humor!”Shaking his head, he turned and walked back to the car. Sure enough the bastard was watching him with self-satisfied pity. “The Lord says fuck off,” he sneered.

“Come on now man,” the cabby admonished as he pulled back out onto the street, “there’s no need to use that kind of language. That’s my Personal Savior you’re talking about.”

“God-bless-William-Bloody-Bradford!” Giles shouted, unable to hold his tongue. “You are exactly the reason why I hate this Country! You can’t have a personal relationship with an infinite unfathomable entity, you fool, anymore that you can with someone who’s been dead or transcendent or what have you for two-thousand years! If you want a personal savior, you need a person to save you. As far as this… ‘God’ thing, It is what It is and It does what It does, while we poor mortals live and die and fuck everything up as best we can! I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Jesus does not love you, even if the bible tells you so!”

And just like that Giles found himself several miles from town standing on the side of the road.

 


	4. Proof

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the Sadie Hawkins Dance approaches and sex, lies and secrets fill the air at Sunnydale High, Buffy isn't the only one having strange dreams and visions or reading ominous portents.

“Let me get this straight,” Spike interrogated Edwards as they emptied the baptismal pool one scummy bucketful at a time into a hole in the floor, “You’re telling me this pit sits directly underneath Sunnydale High School?”

“Yes,” said Edwards apprehensively. In his experience, it was seldom a good thing to see Spike so pleased and excited.

“That very same Sunnydale High School which is not only the reservoir of all the delicious young blood in this cursed town but also the command center of our very own Slayer and her gang of spirited wannabes?”

“I don’t think there’s more than one,” Edwards said, trying to smile.

“And yet,” Spike orated, rising to the crux of his incitement, “you and yours spent sixty years coming down ten miles of tunnels through that mausoleum we came in at?”

“There’s no access to these tunnels from the school,” Edwards argued defensively.

“Bullshit!” Spike declared. “We can jab our way in with a pick ax. I’d bet my ass those kids sneak down to the basement to screw around, and half those little shits don’t have the balls to finish the job. We can hunt in broad daylight if we want.”

“And the Slayer can come down and hunt us if she wants,” Edwards pointed out.

“As opposed to having to take a leisurely stroll first?” Spike sneered. “The only thing keeping that bitch from killing us all right now is that she doesn’t know we’re here.”

“She will if we start dragging screaming schoolgirls down through the fucking sewers to our lair below,” said Edwards sourly.

Spike grinned, “We just have to use a little strategy is all.” With a nod towards the pool, he added, “how else do you think we are going to get this thing filled up before the new moon?”

“What about elementary schools?” Edwards asked hopefully. “We could send those little blighters in after them, in gloves and scarves and little raincoats it’d be fucking adorable.”

Spike laughed and shook his head, “Hilarious,” he admitted. “Especially the look on the teacher’s face the first time one of the little bastards caught on fire. But that’s a straight ticket to a mob scene, Mate. Even in a nasty place like Sunnydale, nobody’d stand for that. Only reason we got away with those is because of the damned flu thing. Besides, I don’t think they really count as virgins until they’re old enough to fuck.”

Creases deepened in Edwards’ already demonically furrowed brow. “Then how, will we know what we’re getting?” he asked.

Spike grinned, slapping him on the back. “Well, obviously, we’ll have to check their credentials.”

“You don’t honestly believe you can tell just by looking at the hymen?” Edwards asked.

Spike shrugged. “There’s a lot of ‘maybe’ in that magic eight ball” he admitted. “We’ll have to err on the side of caution. You can tell a lot from how they react, though. I mean, nobody likes the thought of being raped—not when they’ve got a real shot at it anyway—but virgins go all to pieces about it the minute you lay a hand on them, have you noticed that?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Edwards with icy superiority. Spike returned his disdainful look but decided to let it go. “It’s a pity the Slayer isn’t a virgin,” Edwards mused, thinking of the quality of blood they could have gotten for the ritual.

Spike’s grin broadened again, “You’re not seeing the body as half full, Mate. If the dishes are already broken, we don’t have to handle with care. I tell you… that bitch of Angel’s! She’s been such a pain in my ass for so long, I am more than ready to show her how I can fuck and suck at the same time!”

Edwards stared at his companion in even more open disgust. How had he fallen in with not one but two vampires with a Slayer fetish? No good could come of that kind of thinking.“What?” said Spike defensively, “Turnabout’s fair play; that’s all I’m saying.”

“Humans are food,” Edwards said. “You might as well fuck sheep and goats.”

Spike laughed. “BAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!” he said, and diplomatically refrained from saying, ‘Whereas a true Southern Gentleman like yourself saves his wad for only the highest class of livestock.’

~~~~

…“ _It’s been done this way for a dozen centuries,” Giles explained. His tone was only mildly apologetic…._

“ _Then if none here knows of any just cause—” the Master continued._

“ _Stop!”Angel demanded, standing and advancing up the aisle. “A person just doesn’t wake up one day and stop loving somebody!” He cocked his gun and trained it on Buffy’s heart. “Love is forever!”_

Buffy didn’t know if her alarm clock actually woke her or just happened to go off at the exact moment that her nightmares startled her from sleep. 7:00. An hour after her dad would have left for L.A. The sound of a single gunshot still rung in her ears, impossibly close, as though the source of the report was inside her head.  Which it was.

Her sheets and pillow case still smelled a little bit like Giles. She pulled his white t-shirt out from under her mattress and breathed him in even more deeply to remind herself that he had really been there, had really been inside of her, that they were really lovers, really in love. The knowledge made her very happy. And also very sad. Because it was a love without much space to breath in, without much chance to grow.  And also because she had had the dream again. About Angel. _A person just doesn’t wake up one day and stop loving somebody…_

Buffy reached into the drawer of her nightstand and pulled out Angel’s ring, still hanging on the chain by which she’d worn it in the days following his transformation. She curled her hand into a fist around the ring and let the chain dangle under her gaze. The truth was, she hadn’t stopped loving him, but there was no place for that love in her life now. It was a broken piece of a different puzzle, shoved in where it didn’t fit. 

Not that she was too sure the rest of the pieces fit together either, now that she thought about it. She was in love with and probably pregnant by a man who could be jailed or thrown out of the country for being with her, which meant that they had a secret that desperately needed keeping. But it could only be kept by making a sacrifice that she wasn’t willing to make. She had demons to slay, equations to solve, and less than two hours to read the second half of Romeo and Juliet, which technically meant she should probably at least skim through the first. She had court in two weeks, finals in nine and a possible baby due in November. God! Wasn’t that honestly complicated enough! Why did she have to go and dream about Angel? How do you love a monster, a cold, dead, empty thing that can’t feel love? And if love makes someone a monster, if it hollows him out inside, then how can it still be called love?

“Alright, smart guy,” she said to the familiar, puffy-shirted gentleman on the front of her English Lit book, “Why don’t you tell me something about love. Find the error, prove me wrong.” But all she found was ‘two hours traffic’ of people sneaking in and out of windows sticking sharp objects and body parts in each other, which these days was pretty much what Buffy called a Tuesday night. The one point on which ‘the Bard’ was most definite was also the one on which he was most clearly wrong. One love didn’t burn another out of Buffy’s heart. One piled up on top of the other, crushing her, crippling her, as both of them endlessly burned.

~~~~

Amy pouted into the bathroom mirror as she reapplied her lipstick. Her small frown gave her usually pleasant face a strangely cruel look. The dark circles under her eyes didn’t help any. “Refresh,” she murmured. Her image in the mirror became bright eyed and well rested, though Amy still felt completely slagged.

Suddenly, she felt a firm, urgent hand grip her shoulder, tugging her towards a nearby stall. Gasping, she spun towards her assailant, prepared to defend herself by the power of the dark arts if necessary. “Shush!” Willow hissed, beckoning her into the stall and closing the door.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she whispered, mildly angry, prepared to be extremely pissed if Willow expected her to do anything in a damned bathroom stall more intimate than accepting an apology.

“I called you like ten times!” Willow rasped. Her tone had the emotional effect of shouting though her voice was all but silent.

“I didn’t want to talk to you,” Amy admitted sullenly. “I made a fool of myself.”

“Look, Amy,” Willow whispered urgently, “this isn’t about... all of that. I’ve got a big, big problem. Please, you have to help me!”

“Okay, okay” Amy agreed, sounding more disgruntled than ever, “what’s the problem?”

“It’s my mom,” Willow whined miserably, “I can’t get her to wake up.”

Amy frowned. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “You’ve learned more magic in two weeks that I did in six months. You’re that good. Breaking your own spell should be nothing.”

“Well, it’s not,” said Willow near tears now, “I kissed her. I said the words. I hugged her. I slapped her. I begged her to come back. But she just lays there, breathing in an out, and what if she never wakes up?! What if she starves to death?! I mean, she’s my mom...and...and...my dad’s _gone_... and I’m all by myself...and, I don’t think I like being bad anymore!”

“Willow!” said Amy firmly, gripping her by both shoulders, “breathe! Nobody’s gonna die. The spell doesn’t work like that. It’s like sleeping beauty, perfect preservation.”

“You’re sure about that?” Willow asked, already visibly calmer.

“Completely,” Amy assured her. She chewed her hair for a minute, thinking. “I mean... it’s possible to do a counter spell, but it’s really complicated and ... dangerous. It really should be so much easier for you to break the spell yourself...”

“Well, it’s not,” said Willow glumly. “What about that spell Giles did on your mom?” she asked. “That reversed everything and it looked... okay not easy, but…”

“Trust me,” Amy said, “you don’t want that. That spell can do serious psychic damage. I mean, not to my mom, ‘cause she’s to mean to die, but that spell could literally kill you.”

“Really?” said Willow skeptically. Even knowing he was no saint, it was still hard to imagine _Giles_ doing anything that might kill a student.

“Buffy was dying,” Amy pointed out, following her train of thought surprisingly well, “He couldn’t let that happen. He’s totally in love with her.”

“What?” Willow laughed nervously, feigning disbelief, “that’s ridiculous.”

Amy laughed at Willow’s dismayed expression, “Well, I’m not saying their like doing it or anything,” she clarified. “He’s too much of a goody-good guy to ever put his parts where they don’t belong. But it’s there; you can see it in his eyes.”

“Right,” said Willow, “you are so right about that. So anyway... a counter spell.”

Amy gave Willow a hard, evaluative kind of look, then shrugged indifferently. “You know,” she murmured thoughtfully, “it’s too bad we can’t do a Krathon’s scales... it’s a kind of a diagnostic, thing. It could tell us what you’re doing wrong...”

“So why can’t we?” Willow asked.

“It has to be done at the aphelion of the Earth from the Sun,” she explained, and that’s not ‘til the fourth of July.”

“Then we have a plan,” Willow joked, “I think Mom could use a little rest. Hey, maybe we should wait ‘til _next_ July. That way I can graduate and move out of the house first. Oh, come on, Amy,” she said in response to the horrified look she was getting. “I’m kidding.”

Amy shook her head. “No,” she said, “you’re not. That’s the problem” She was trembling. “Willow, to break the spell, you have to _want_ your mom to wake up—”

“I do!” Willow assured her, exasperated. “We’re supposed to see the lawyer tomorrow and they’re probably already missing her at work... and, even if I get through Court without anyone noticing, there’s the whole probation thing—”

“No,” Amy cut in, “Willow, you’re not getting it. You can’t just want her back because it’s convenient for you, or even because it’s the right thing to do. You have to want her back because you _want_ her back. Willow, to break this spell, you have to love her.”

~~~~

“Hey, Buffy!” Cordelia called a little too enthusiastically as she walked into Ms. Frank’s second period English class, “Are those new shoe’s?”

Buffy sat next to her, smiling wryly. “You didn’t do the reading,” she guessed.

Cordelia nodded. “I’m still not used to Willow not being in this class. Did you get a chance to do it last night?”

“More or less,” Buffy confirmed, more amused than she knew she should have been.

“More more or more less?” Cordelia asked nervously.

“I got through most of it,”Buffy said, “Couple of murders, little bit of creepy tweenaged sex, but that’s pretty much just implied. I skipped the parts that were supposed to be funny. Teachers never ask about the funny parts. If Ms. Frank tries to call on you, I’ll raise my hand.”

Buffy and Cordelia spent the first half of class passing notes. It was weird how her dating Xander had sort of made them friends by default. Despite her flaws, it was nice to have a friend at Sunnydale High right now, and easy to remember why they had almost been friends in the first place. They had a lot in common. They could talk about things like fashion and sports—girly sports like skating and volley ball, even—that neither Xander nor Willow even wanted to understand. But Buffy wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about what Cordelia was trying to tell her now. _'You won’t believe what I saw at The Bronze last night!'_ Cordelia wrote.

‘You’ll never believe who climbed in my window last night,’ Buffy thought, and truth be told she was tempted to spill her guts, not in a note of course, but after class. She needed someone to talk to about her surreal sex life now that Willow wasn’t around.' _What?_ ' She wrote back instead.

' _Amy turned Willow into a guy and they were making out!_ ' Cordelia wrote. Buffy felt guilty, disloyal, discussing Willow’s personal life with Cordelia of all people, especially when she was being so gleeful about it. But she couldn’t not know something this huge about Willow.

 _'How do you know it was her?_ ' Buffy asked.

“That’s very interesting, Larry,” said Ms. Frank, coming to stand directly in front of Buffy, looking at her casually, as if that just happened to be where she wanted to stand. “Nancy, do you agree? What do you see in this scene? Act III Scene V, page 1127,” she added just as casually, as though she didn’t see Buffy doubtfully riffling through the pages.

“Oh no it’s definitely one unified scene, Ms. Frank,” Nancy explained correctively, “It’s all about stripping away barriers to the self. Juliet represents the self. She pushes everyone away and finishes the scene alone because we are all ultimately alone.”

“But what does this scene say about love?” Ms. Frank asked, digging for something a little less abstract. “Who in this scene really loves Juliet; who does she really love? Buffy?”

“Well…” Buffy said, glance at the text to refresh her memory, which at least it was part of the part that she had actually read, “Her father just threatened to throw her out and let her starve to death unless she lets him pimp her to his friends, which doesn’t sound a _lot_ like love...”

“Then I take it you agree with Larry’s assessment?” Ms. Frank prompted.

“Well... I don’t know,” said Buffy hedged, “I mean, I’m not saying Romeo doesn’t love her... exactly.” She fumbled, having no idea what Larry had said, striking out on her own.“It’s more like… he doesn’t do a very good job of it? Of loving her. I mean, he makes everything impossibly hard for her, and then he just climbs out the window.”

“So does anyone in this scene truly love Juliet? What about the nurse and her advice?”

Buffy thought about it for a minute, “It seems like practical advice...” she began, then with sudden realization, “but it’s not. She means well, but she doesn’t understand what she’s asking Juliet to do. She loves Romeo, more than loves him, she _is_ him almost, she belongs to him body and soul... ‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name’ my God if it were only that simple! But Juliet is a Montague and not a Capulet and it matters what you call the rose! Because… it’s the truth! Because if you give your love, if you give _yourself_ if it’s real, if you mean it, how can you take it back again and give it to someone else? You can’t! You can’t! It doesn’t work like that! It shouldn’t work like that!! She’s destroyed him!!! He’s left with nothing while she sits there in her father’s house going on with her stupid teenage life like nothing happened, and it’s not right! She doesn’t have the right to... abandon him and just go fuck somebody else!!!”

Ms. Frank was too stunned to speak, even to object to her language.  Buffy was on her feet now, shouting, tears streaming down her face, her fist closed around something hanging from the chain around her neck. Cordelia stared at her, horrified, along with everyone else. “She’s supposed to _love_ him!!” Buffy shouted.“If you can just take it back and give it again... that’s not love!!! A person just doesn’t wake up one day and stop loving somebody!!!!! LOVE IS FOREVER!!!!!”

Buffy collapsed in the aisle, banging her head pretty solidly on the corner of a table. There was a dribble of blood down the front of Buffy’s white sweater, but her head wasn’t bleeding. The blood came from her tight clinched fist, dripping down the broken chain that dangled from it. “My God,” Ms. Frank shouted, running to her, "somebody get the nurse!”

~~~~

“What’d I tell ya, Mate?” Spike crowed, taking a flashlight from Edwards to shine on the newly expose concrete. He tapped at the structure experimentally with the end of his shovel, putting his ear to it to listen. “Water,” he confirmed. “Lots of it. Storm drain maybe.” They had only had to dig about five feet.

He grabbed his pick and prepared to penetrate the watery chamber. “Don’t!” Edwards warned. “There could be a grate! The sun—”

“Pussy!” Spike jeered, and stuck it in as hard as he could, making a hole just big enough to get a fist in, with a crack running from it. The orifice gushed, leaving Spike and Edwards wetter than a couple of BDM girls watching Jesse Owens run the hundred meters. “Now,” said Spike, grinning, “we’ll just let that drain off a little and come finish her off about sunset.”

~~~~

“Do you want to tell me what that was about?” Cordelia asked as she drove Buffy home.

Buffy sighed, “I really don’t know. I mean, I _remember_ it. But… it’s like I’m remembering someone else. I just can’t understand... Oh my God, those last lines were from my dream! Those weren’t my thoughts and feelings at all!”  But when she said this, it didn’t feel true. She, Buffy Summers, had totally wigged about Juliet marrying Paris for reasons that, silly as they now seemed, had belonged to her own life. 

But Giles was too old to play Paris, and she loved him too much. Of course, Buffy was a little long in the tooth for Juliet. ‘Long in the tooth’... what an odd expression. It made her think of vampires. ‘Dream on, school girl. Your boyfriend is dead’ ‘or ‘twere as good he were...’ And she had already given herself a second time she realized, far more completely than the first. She had done so much more than fuck Giles. She had mated with him. They had merged on a cellular level, or probably so. 

“I think I’m still a little light headed,” Buffy said aloud, and because Cordelia was giving her a look, because she really wanted to tell her more, wanted to be asked, to have it pried out of her, she told her about her dream.

“So, in your dream,” Cordelia asked worriedly, “Xander was having sex with Joyce?” Buffy stared at her. “I’m sorry, Buffy,” Cordelia said, not sounding sorry at all, “but your dreams worry me a little more than the average person’s.”

“I’m sure it’s symbolic,” Buffy said dryly.

“Like you marrying Giles?” Cordelia asked. She watched long enough to see Buffy’s discomfort before returning her eyes to the road. Older guy, younger girl, first love gone straight out the window; stranger things had happened. And it was true about Willow and Amy. As far as Xander and Joyce… it’s pretty hard to fall and scrape your penis, Cordelia thought, if you haven’t got it out.

“Will you… stay with me?” Buffy asked when Cordelia pulled up in front of her house. “I don’t want to be alone right now, because…” she looked down and aside at the car door. “I think I’m going to take another pregnancy test.”

“Of course, Buffy,” Cordelia said, “what are friends for?” And she meant it.  Besides, she was never going to pass up the chance to know the results of someone else’s pregnancy test.

“So… we are talking about Giles, right?” Cordelia said sympathetically as they both sat on Buffy’s bed waiting to read the test.

“I guess that’s pretty obvious,” Buffy admitted, “between my scary dreams and my swinging lack of a social life.”

“It’s been five minutes,” Cordelia said. Buffy made a queasy face. “Do you want me to look?” Cordelia offered. Buffy looked doubtful. “I have read one before,” Cordelia assured her, then made a face of her own. That was more than she’d meant to say. After Harmony, she ought to know better. She went to read the results.

“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said on her return, with sympathy that sounded fake even though it wasn’t, because, as Buffy welll understood,  she had learned from the age of four to default to a calculatedly cheerful tone of voice.

“I’m not pregnant?” Buffy said, sounding oddly disappointed.

“No, lame brain,” Cordelia said, sounding much more naturally sincere. “You are.”

~~~~

“Oh my God!” Harmony stage whispered, responding to someone much quieter. “Well I always said she was a psycho. And Cordelia like left with her? She is just too far gone! Well she can have him! He has a tiny dick, and he sings like a girl anyway!”

“Miss Kendall,” said Mrs. Rae pointedly, “come up to the board and complete the proof for number 23.” Horror struck, Harmony tried to stammer an excuse, but Mrs. Rae was unmoved by compassion. Everyone laughed. Then they saw what Harmony was writing. They stopped laughing:

GIVEN: LOVE IS FOREVER.

SINCE: A PERSON DOESN’T JUST WAKE UP AND STOP LOVING SOMEBODY!

THEREFORE: DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME, BITCH!!!!

 


	5. Just an Old-fashioned Love Song…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lovesick spirit moves the denizens Sunnydale High around like toys in a doll house, putting Harmony in particular in a very uncomfortable position. Willow decides to show Oz how she really feels. Buffy gives Giles some wonderful and terrible news.

From the minute Harmony walked into the principal’s office, something felt not-normal. Principal Snyder was giving her a weird look. “I bought these for you,” he said, thrusting a stack of detention form before him like a bouquet. “I thought I’d bring the dance to you.”

Harmony could almost smell the flowers. She opened her mouth to say, ‘What the fuck?’ but it came out, “It’s a Sadie Hawkins Dance, remember? I didn’t invite you.”

“Well here we are anyway,” James pointed out. “The music’s already playing.” He extended his hands to her, his eyes full of desperate longing. “We might as well dance one dance.” Heart pounding, Grace took hold of his hands and let him lead her into an open patch of floor near the record player. One last dance. What did it matter now? What could anything matter now? Here at the mouth of Hell, here at the end of the world?

They had hardly danced a step when his mouth found hers. He held her tighter and slipped a hand under her blouse. She grabbed his backside through his jeans. He lifted her up and laid her down on the desk, while their song played on the phonograph: ♫ _The moon may be high, but I can’t see a thing in the sky_ …♪ She lay motionless, eyes closed, while he undressed her, imaging what it would be like to be dead, not to be tormented by all these feelings. When she felt him inside her, she opened her eyes and looked up into his, moving her pelvis against him at last, complimenting his motion as they made love for the last time. It was a bitter sweet pleasure, the last she would know on Earth.

“Oh Jesus Christ!” Mr. Beach squeaked. Harmony’s eyes were already open, but it was as if she opened them when she saw for the first time that the person on top of her and (Eww!) inside of her, _fucking_ her, was not a seventeen-year-old jock in a letterman jacket but a bald, rat faced Principal Snyder.

She screamed. She didn’t stop screaming. She was slapping him in the face which was very unpleasant on top of a situation that was confusing and disturbing enough. He was doing his best to get off of her. The whole point of his panicked rocking back and forth motion was to get off of her, but his legs were too short to reach the floor and he needed his arms to protect his face. And in his panic he had failed to take the first step he should have taken. He wasn’t thinking clearly. His dick was still inside this girl, this student, who was pinned under him and screaming and hitting him in the face, and by the time he processed half of what that meant, he was coming inside of her, groaning with a mixture of regret and physical release.

“I’ll… um… come back later,” Mr. Beach simpered. “I was never here!” And he ran out.

Harmony was finally able to push Snyder off of her, dumping him in the floor on his bare ass. But it was too late. His cum was dripping out of her suddenly very public parts. “What’s the matter with you, you pervert!?!” she demanded hysterically, in tears, as she pulled her panties up and her skirt down.

Snyder scrambled to his feet, pulling his pants up as he went. “Shussssshhhhh!” he hissed as he put his cock and balls away, still not sure how she had tricked him into having sex with her, but understanding all too clearly why she had waited until there was a witness to loudly pretend to be upset about. “Stop screaming,” he snarled at her hatefully. “You win, you evil little slut! Have your lawyer call my lawyer, we’ll work out some kind of undisclosed settlement. It’s over,” he pleaded, “Just please, please let it be over!”

“Let it be over?” James demanded, “How can I do that? Will you tell me how? You can’t make me disappear just because you say it’s ‘over.’ I still have to be here in this school where you are every day—to be always near you, never with you—I can’t do that. I won’t!”

“I know,” Grace murmured, “that’s why I’m leaving Sunnydale.”

Minutes later, Mrs. Haulk, the school secretary came back from her dentist appointment to find Harmony Kendall holding Principal Snyder at gunpoint in his office.“I’m not afraid to use it, I swear!” she girl cried with desperate resolve. “If I can’t be with you—!” Her voice broke with emotion.

“Oh my God!” Snyder gasped, sounding somehow vaguely effeminate, unmanned by his terror.

Mrs. Haulk stood frozen as he fled past her and the girl followed shouting, “Don’t walk away from me, Bitch!” Mrs. Haulk buzzed the school security officer, then dialed 9-1-1.

“Alright... just...” Principal Snyder was saying with uncharacteristic gentleness as Rusty ran out of his office and into the hallway, his own gun in his hands, “You know you don’t want to do this. Let’s both just calm down. Now give me the gun.”

“Don’t do that damn it!” the girl cried, raising her weapon.

There was no time for warnings. Rusty raised his gun and shot directly at her head, the way he had always been taught. He almost fainted with relief when he realized he had only hit her in the shoulder, apparently causing her to drop the gun, which was nowhere in sight. “That’s it,” he said aloud as he watched two teachers wrestle the confused girl to the floor. “I’ve had it with this school! I’m going to get a safer job! These kids are loonytoons!”

~~~~

When Buffy got to Giles’ house she found him leaning against his front door, wheezing and out of breath. “What happened to you?” she asked worriedly. Giles held up two fingers and continued wheezing. “You weren’t attacked by something were you? Were you? Are there monsters? Is there a monster here somewhere?” He shook his head, still gasping and panting, still leaning on the door. “Oh, thank God! Unless there’s a monster somewhere else? Is there? Are there monster’s I need to go fight somewhere else? Anything I need to do? Anything at all? Like right now? Somewhere else?”

“For the love of God, Buffy!” Giles shouted, finding his lungs at last, “Can’t you see that I am out of breath? I’ve just walked all the way from Pleasant Hill Cemetery. We aren’t all of us teenagers who can go bounding about over hill and dale! Give me a minute!”

“Well you sound like you can breathe alright now,” Buffy all but pouted, folding her arms, half sulky and half chastened.

Giles took a closer look at her as he regained himself at last. The form and alleged cause of her sulking might have been affected, but she was genuinely upset, she was shaking. “Come in,” he said, getting his key out and sliding it in the lock, “Sit down.” They sat down on the couch and he put his arm around her awkwardly, as if he wasn’t sure he should. She shifted uncomfortably. “What is it?” he asked. “Did your father—Is everything alright?”

Buffy nodded. “No worse than ever,” she said. “I mean, he still thinks I’m a liar and a slut and the next thing to a murderer, but he didn’t see anything, not really, and the gun was totally imaginary. So,” she added, just a little more encouragingly, squeezing his thigh, “nothing to worry about.” She turned her face towards him as if vaguely expecting to be kissed, but he didn’t lean down. He looked… troubled. “So,” she said after a while, more or less sympathetically, “Pleasant Hill, huh?”

“Well I… wasn’t invited to the funeral…” he half apologized.

“It’s alright,” Buffy assured him firmly, taking both his hands in hers, seeming stronger, calmer in the face of his distress. “I’m pretty sure you’re allowed to love two people if one of them is dead.” Her eyes were two deep liquid green pools of mercy. He willingly fell into them, drowning all his doubts. He pulled her close and kissed her lips. Her mouth opened to him, admitting his tongue and bringing forth hers in return as he was coming to expect, making his heart (and his cock) leap with excitement.

He ran his hand up the inside of her thigh and was moderately displeased to find that she was wearing pants. It took the keen edge off the knife of his desire having to think of the mechanics of getting her out of them and then laying her on his narrow couch and therefore having to remember exactly what was wrong with his mattress.  Buffy made a slight whining noise of regret. For a horrified instant Giles thought she knew what he was thinking, but then she said, “Oh! It’s no good. I feel too guilty. I… have to tell you something or I’m going to feel like I’m lying to you the whole time.”

Giles’ brow furrowed. He sat up a little straighter. “What is it, Buffy?” he asked.

“Remember how I told you last night that I was definitely for almost 99% sure not pregnant?” She made an apologetic face.

“Oh,” said Giles gravely, “I see.”

“I wasn’t lying… exactly,” Buffy sort of whined, sounding appallingly like a child. “I did take a test yesterday, and it was negative. But the one I took today says I’m pregnant.”

“Oh, Buffy,” he gasped, giving her a look of excruciating guilt and pity, “I’m so sorry.”

“Wow,” Buffy teased, “remind me not to get one of those baby books that asks ‘what was the father’s first reaction?’”

“Buffy,” said Giles crossly, cleaning his glasses agitatedly, “this is nothing to joke about.”

“Well excuse me for trying to lighten the mood,” she said sullenly.

“Best to get this business taken care of as quickly as possible,” he went on meditatively, almost as if Buffy weren’t there. “Normally the Council would expect a report on this sort of thing, but given the circumstances, that’s the last—”

“Giles,” said Buffy seriously, “I’m not getting anything ‘taken care of,’ with or without informing the Council.”

“What are you saying?” Giles asked. He seemed honestly perplexed.

“I’m having the baby,” Buffy explained resolutely.

“Buffy, don’t be ridiculous!” Giles scolded.

“ _Excuse_ me?” Buffy demanded, eyes flashing. “What did you just say?”

“It was... a poor choice of words,” he conceded, in a gentler tone. “But, surely you must realize there is only one sensible thing to do in this situation.” Somehow, this more reasonable tone—this earnest, caring, _parental_ tone—was even more infuriating than his initial angry castigation.

“You know what, _Rupert_ ,” Buffy said savagely, “This may have escaped your attention while you were shoving your fat cock inside me, but you’re not my dad! I think you’ve pretty much given up the right to talk to me like some fucking kid who has to be told how to behave sensibly!”

“I may not have the right,” he conceded, “but as your Watcher I still have a responsibility to—”

“To what? Knock me up then order me to get rid of it?” Buffy demanded.

“Kn—Or—!...I—!” For once in his life, it took Giles more than a moment to find his tongue. He flung his glasses down on the coffee table and _almost_ grabbed Buffy by the shoulder before he thought better of it. “Nobody’s ordering you to do anything,” he said tensely, quietly, “But I would like to assume that you would want to do the responsible thing in this... situation.”

“Would you listen to yourself?” Buffy demanded. “‘Thing,’ ‘business,’ ‘situation’? You expect me to do something you can’t even bring yourself to say, and you act like it’s nothing!”

“Buffy,” he acknowledged, sounding a little less superior though no less strained, “I know an... abortion is not nothing... but as the Slayer—”

“I’m not allowed to have a life,” Buffy finished. “Stupid me, I forgot!”

“A life?” he scoffed, “What kind of a life are you going to have being tied down to a family before you’ve even finished high school, hum!?!" Giles took a deep breath, trying unsuccessfully to get a hold of himself. “Buffy,” he shouted. “you’re seventeen years old!”

“And I might not live to be eighteen!” she retorted. “I _probably_ won’t live to be twenty-five, so don’t you dare ‘someday’ me like you don’t know any better!”

Her words hit Giles in the face like a cold bucket of truth. He sat down on the couch and buried his face in his hands. “I don’t have an adequate response to that.” He admitted, getting a handle on himself at last.

Though he had never directly addressed with Buffy the grim statistical fact of the Slayer’s life expectancy or lack thereof, he hadn’t done anything to hide it either and despite her pose of carefree obtusety, she had obviously worked it out, or close enough. The truth was, it was worse than she knew. In fact, one might be better off thinking in terms of five and ten year survival rates, which were about 25% and 10% respectively. Giles heart balled into a fist, or felt like it did. He’d never let himself think of that fact so directly in relationship to Buffy before. He was a man in love with a butterfly, a shepherd with a sacrificial lamb.

There it was again, that word. ‘Love’ “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “I’m just… not very good at not knowing what to do.”

~~~~

Harmony wept and wailed and cried out in anguish all the way to the ambulance while the EMTs put pressure on her shoulder to try and stop the bleeding. Her other arm was handcuffed to the gurney. Principal Snyder watched her through the blinds of his office window, trying hard to give at least half his attention to his ongoing phone call, horrified to think what she might be saying between sobs. He had the Sheriff, his first cousin, Ronald Wilkins, on the line.

“How sure are you?” Ron asked calmly.

Snyder Shuddered. “I’m sure!” he snapped. Then, because, under the circumstances, he had to be sure as soon as possible who he could or couldn’t rely on, because he had to trust someone to help him cover this up, he told his cousin what had happened.

Ron took a deep breath and calculated the relative feasibility and advantages, to the Town as a whole, meaning the Mayor, of protecting his cousin and of hanging him out by the balls. R.C. knew things, but he was probably too sickly devoted to the power structure repeat them even under the torture of facing a lifetime as a registered sex offender. But he was a Wilkins in every way that counted, like it or not. As for the girl, her parents, they were no one, New-to-Towners with a little bit of money. Of course, they had half raised Garrett Chase’s daughter, but he wasn’t the sentimental type. Besides, people would much rather live in the town where the crazy girl lost it at school than in the town where the girl got raped by the principal in his office.

“I’ll call Garrett,” Ron offered, “have him recommend her parents a good lawyer who can shut her the hell up. Then I’ll have Engels offer to drop the attempted murder charge if they agree to send her for a forty-five day commitment to the Sunnydale Mental Hospital. Trust me, after six weeks in that place, she won’t know who she has or hasn’t fucked.”

~~~~

Willow had never actually been upstairs in Oz’s house. It was a neat, normal hallway, like hallways anywhere, but at the end of it was Oz’s door, handily marked with a poster of fractals in psychedelic colors. Suddenly, she felt a little better. There was no one as awesome as Oz. Maybe he would forgive her. Maybe he would understand. Then again, maybe he would fall on the floor and scream that she’d broken his heart.

Willow knocked hesitantly on the door. “Come in,” Oz called. The sound of his voice filled her with love and pain and joy and remorse. She hadn’t come there to lie to Oz, but she hadn’t come there to lose him either. To tell the truth, she wasn’t exactly sure what she had come here to do. She just needed to be where Oz was.

Willow steeled her resolve and entered. Oz’s eyes registered pleasant surprise, then, taking in her obvious emotional turmoil, concern. “Hey,” he said smiling a small smile. He sounded... slightly uneasy. For Oz, that meant deeply troubled.

Willow hovered in the doorway, not seeming to want to come near. “Hey,” she replied nervously. Oz could see, hear and smell that she was worried, terrified in fact. There was something strange about her scent, even besides that. She smelled of her mother, which surprised him, and of Amy Madison, which didn’t particularly, but there was something else.

“What time is it?” he asked worriedly, picking something he knew enough to be worried about. “Don’t you have to be in school?”

“Oh, Oz!” Willow cried, lunging at him as if to put her arms around him. His two huge casted arms were in the way. She knelt by his bed instead and, weeping, lay her head in his lap. “I love you,” she sobbed. “I love you so much! I want to be with you, just you, nobody else.”

Suddenly, Oz knew what had been bothering him about Willow since he first smelled her. She had tried to wash it off. She had done a pretty good job, but the vaguest trace of the scent still clung to her. It clung _directly_ to her, not just on her clothes or even on her skin or in her hair, but in the folds of her body, in the _roots_ of her hair. It was the scent of another man. “So who else don’t you want to be with,” he asked, a slight edge to his voice, “and what have you been doing all week to figure that out?”

“What... um... are you... talking about, ‘cause... I certainly... don’t know?” Her words were stilted and unnatural as if being force out of her mouth by some means not directly under her control. She was the world’s worst liar. Normally he found it endearing. But not now. Because Oz was more sure by the second that he knew what she was lying about.

“Just tell me who it is!” he demanded, then, startled by the animal ferocity of his own anger, he suddenly quieted.

“No one! No one!” she sobbed. “I love you! You’re… Oz! There’s no one! There’s no one else!” Her words seemed to be true, Oz thought. Or at least she meant them. He found himself running a soothing hand through her hair, wanting to make it okay.

Oz felt his sudden anger ebbing away just as suddenly as it had come. He didn’t need to know, he decided, didn’t want to know. He needed her. He needed her to stay and fill the space in his heart that had been empty and aching every day they had been apart. He put his hand under her chin and lifted her face. “We’re here now,” he said.

Willow sat up, leaned carefully against his chest and kissed him, tears still streaming down her face. He smelled less fear in her now. There was a different kind of excitement. It was an inviting smell. Oz leaned back against his pillows, remaining in Willow’s embrace. She shifted slightly to make sure her weight was being born by the mattress and not his battered body. She pulled his bed covers aside. He was wearing a robe that opened down the front. She leaned over him and planted a row of kisses down the center of his chest, opening the robe as she went.

Oz smiled. He could see where this was going. He liked where it was going, but he wasn’t sure the thinking behind going there was anything like clear enough to prevent regrets afterward “We haven’t been going out that long,” he reminded her. “You don’t owe me anything. You’re your own girl.”

“Yeah,” Willow said, eyes downcast, then suddenly, fiercely, she looked up into his eyes. “But see,” she said decisively, “The thing is, I don’t want to be! I want to be yours!” She blushed when she said what she said next, but she said it. “I want you to fuck me.”

Oz’s heart was pounding. His skin was humming. She made a pretty compelling argument. “I’m... interested,” he said, “but logistics might be a concern.”

“It can work,” Willow assured him enthusiastically as she reached into his robe and put her hand on his penis. “We can pretend like you’re tied up.” Oz’s eyes widened. He hadn’t expected her to move that fast. The way she grabbed right a hold and slid her hand like a cylinder from the head to the base of his cock and halfway back up again, pulling the lose skin a little tight but not too tight, told him that she’d had her hands on one before. That was contrary to his previous impression. He tried not to wonder whether his impression had been wrong or her experience level had changed. It was getting easier not to wonder about things like that.

Still holding his hardening cock at mid-shaft, Willow leaned down and took the head into her mouth, her long red hair falling around her face, sweeping against his groin and belly. Oz moaned with pleasure, then winced in pain. Willow stopped and looked up at him worriedly. She looked a little comical still holding the head of his penis in her mouth with that look on her face. A little comical and very, very sexy. This at least was clearly something she had never done before. “Not quite so hard,” he had to tell her. “Yeah, like that. Use your tongue.”

After a minute or two, his dick was so big and so hard that she couldn’t really get it all in her mouth without gagging. He had to tell her that it was okay to just suck the end of it and use her hands on the rest. He was definitely hard enough now to do it in this position. He definitely wanted to. But he didn’t happen to have any condoms handy. The way she was going at it now, slurping and stroking like the fate of the world depended on his impending orgasm, he didn’t think counting on her to stop on command was the best plan in the world.

Suddenly, she _was_ stopping, shifting positions in a way that was impossible to misinterpret. She was pushing her skirt up and her underwear down. If he was going to object, he had damned well better do it now. He didn’t. He was too close to irresistible temptation, too filled with hungry, animal passion, more than he could express any other way in his half helpless condition. “God, Willow!” he gasped, as she slid her hot, wet cunt down over his dick.

“I love you, Oz,” she sighed, then gave a started gasp of her own as he filled her more completely. She felt an instant, not even a second of pain, the fleeting present severing the past from the future, sharp like a glass breaking. She belonged to him at last, the way it should be. Willow felt Oz move within her. She moved her body in response. They fell into a slow easy rhythm, like they had been making love all their lives. The sensation was so intense, so gratifying. It was almost as physically pleasurable as fucking Amy, and it felt a lot more satisfying more... right. More like making love.

 


	6. Talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Giles tells Buffy the facts of life under the Council.... some of them anyway. Oz's father tries to tell him a thing or two about witches. Willow tries to explain things to Amy. Cordelia confronts Xander about a certain rumor. Meanwhile, the vampires are taking action.

 

“The way I see it,” Buffy said, “this is where we’re at. I love you. You love me. I’m having your baby. All that being the case, I think I would be sort of a crime if we didn’t go on having really, really amazing sex. I mean, it’s not like we’re going to be able to help it,” she pointed out, “seeing each other every day.” She squeezed his penis gently through his pants saying, “It’s not like I’m going to forget _this_ thing is here.

Giles squeezed her breast in return, wanting to accept her very obvious invitation to seal their new understanding with an immediate act of intercourse, but he knew it wasn’t that simple, that she didn’t fully understand, that he hadn’t yet begun to explain, how very, very difficult it was going to be to square her having his child with the Council. “I think,” he began gravely, regretfully taking her hand in his, “we need to talk about a few more things.” Quickly, nervously, he rattled off a succession of disjointed statements about Council policy and “the commitments demanded of Slayer and Watcher alike.”

“Waaaaaiiiiit a minute,” said Buffy incredulously, finally absorbing the implications of what she was hearing, “are you telling me Slayers aren’t _allowed_ to have children.”

“In a nut shell,” Giles admitted, “It’s not _quite_ as clear cut as that, of course. A few of the longer lived Slayers have eventually become mothers, some with the acquiescence of the Council and... some without. But, it is a Watcher’s duty to… firmly discouraged his Slayer from taking on any serious outside commitment, including family obligations.

“Um, excuse me,” said Buffy, “but I’m not seeing how that’s the same level of commitment ‘for Watchers and Slayers alike.’”

“I suppose it’s a matter of perspective.” Giles reasoned, “For a Watcher, you see, having at least two children is a positive duty. I dare say, some on the Council would be happy to make an exception in my case, though that didn’t stop them bringing up my... shirking as grounds to deny me this assignment. God, if Quentin Travers ever found out that I’ve been… making love to my Slayer! Well, nobody loves a good I-told-you-so more than a bunch of Watchers.”

“You don’t say?” Buffy teased good-naturedly.

Giles tried with limited success to smile, “Yes,” he said, sad-eyed, “strange as it may seem. But I’m afraid it is all a bit more serious than that. You see, the Watcher’s Council isn’t just some club that you can join or resign from. It isn’t just an employer that can fire me, though it is that. It’s something you’re born into, whole families, generation after generation. The Council is the oldest extant human organization, older than the Roman Catholic Church, certainly older than any mere nation-state, and in many ways more powerful. Among our own people, certainly more respected. It’s more a government than anything, and like any government, it feels entitled to punish and coerce those subject to it’s authority as much as necessary to see that it’s laws are obeyed. Even to the point of death.”

~~~~

When Willow had come and gone Oz’s father entered. “We need to talk.” he said.

“Talk,” said Oz.

“Do you have any idea who that girl is?” he demanded.

Oz almost smiled. “I like to think so,” he said.

“She’s a Levine,” said Jonah Osborne harshly.

“Rosenberg,” Oz corrected him, puzzled by his tone.

“I’m talking about her mother’s family,” he explained, though Oz knew for a fact that Sheila’s maiden name was Kaminski. “It was before your time, hell I was just a kid, but everyone who’s lived in this town for very many years knows about the Levines, or they ought to. They’re dangerous women. You don’t want to get mixed up with one.”

Oz was amused by the irony, but he didn’t show it. His father had no idea he was talking to a werewolf. “Dad,” he said reasonably, “I’m a grown man.”

“She’s a witch!” Jonah spat.

“No she’s not,” Oz replied. “Her friend Amy is. Anyway, so what?”

“For a ‘grown man’,” Jonah said you sure don’t know a hell of a lot about the world.”

“You raised me,” Oz pointed out. “What did you forget to tell me?”

“Witches are evil,” his father answered flatly, “whether they mean to be or not. Their power comes from the dark gods. It can’t be used for good.”

“And you think Willow’s a witch because of her grandmother’s maiden name?”

“‘The poisonous tree cannot bring forth good fruit.’” his father intoned gravely. “‘That which originates from a black deed will blossom in a foul manner.’”

Oz raised an eyebrow. His dad wasn’t the scripture quoting type, or the movie quoting type even. He thought of his encounter with the marble woman in the Star of David Cemetery. She had indeed seemed powerful, dangerous. “I’ll keep my eyes open,” he promised.

“Believe what you see,” Jonah advised. “Don’t try to rationalize it. In the meantime,” he added, “if you have to fuck this girl, use a condom.”

“Dad, I know how not to multiply,” Oz assured him, knowing full well that he had just leaned very heavily on some pretty shaky math. He would have to talk to Willow about that.

“It’s not just that,” his father explained, “You don’t want a witch to get... a piece of you, blood, semen, anything, especially with your consent. It gives her power over you.”

“Since when do you know so much about witches?” Oz asked.

Jonah shuddered. “Since I had to grow up in this Goddamned town!” he snapped, slamming the conversation closed. After more than thirty years, he could still smell the flesh burning. He could still hear the shrieks of the dying and the exhortations of his elders to remain firm: ‘There’s no cure but the fire!’

~~~~

Giles would not have thought that particular talk could have ended with he and Buffy taking each other’s clothes off, but it had. The heat between them was too powerful to withstand. And it provided a much needed escape from reality. But the mechanics of the real world kept getting in their way. “This couch is just way too narrow,” Buffy complained.

“I think I know a way to handle that,” said Giles, smiling.

“You mean like this?” Buffy teased, grinning back as she handled his cock and balls.

“Ha, ha(!)” he said dryly, putting his own hand on her cunt and sliding a couple of fingers inside. “I mean,” he clarified, “why don’t you grab a hold of the back of the couch and bend over it so that this sweet slot sticks out behind you.”

“Yeah,” she breathed, squeezing and caressing him even as she moved to comply. “Oh, fuck, yes!” she added as he stood behind her, grabbed her by the butt and thrust himself inside her. “Yes! I can feel every inch of your big, beautiful god-fucking cock! It goes so deep!”

“God, yes!” Giles agreed, in paroxysm of ecstasy as she deliberately, lovingly squeezed him with the muscles of her cunt so tightly he almost couldn’t move. Almost. You could slide a python into a garden hose if it was as wet and flexible and _eager_ to be invaded as Buffy’s twat. They made love for more than an hour by turns slow and rhythmically, then hard and fast, repeating and varying that pattern until at last they came in perfect unison and collapsed onto the couch together, snuggled in each other’s arms, glowing with joy.

But it didn’t take long for Giles’ guilt, his most steadfast companion, to return. By making love to Buffy under these circumstances, he felt he was letting her think that everything between them was far more settled than it really was. In truth, they were still in mortal danger and in complete disagreement as to what they should do about it. They may have 'talked', but now they had un-talked. Nothing had been resolved.

~~~~

Edwards shielded his eyes with his hands, wishing he had something to shield his hands with. Spike sniffed scornfully turning up his collar. The oblique afternoon rays penetrated the damp, ass-stinking chamber at an angle through the large grated opening above. Edwards didn’t know if his eyes were watering more from the sun or the stench. He had worse problems. Spike was eying a hatch in the ceiling with insufficient caution, clearly seconds away from leaping up and opening it, when they heard the voices: two humans in the chamber above.

“Are you sure about this, Karl?” A grating female voice demanded.

“Ruthie,” crowed a cock-sure older male voice, “I’ve never been so Goddamned sure of anything in all my Goddamned life! We’re going straight to the national championships!”

“But is it worth the risk, Karl?” the bitch whined.

“What kind of a question is that?” he barked back. “Don’t you _want_ to be a winner?”

“You _know_ I do,” she moaned, torn between fear and temptation as humans so often were, “more than anything else in the world.”

“Well... there you go then,” said Karl, as if everything were satisfactorily concluded. Maybe it was. The woman didn’t respond that Edwards could tell. He let himself hope that they’d gone. The radiation level in the subterranean space was becoming tolerable as the sun began to set at last. If he could just rest here a few minutes... Edwards’ ears were invaded by the metal on metal grinding of the hatch opening. He flattened himself into a corner, covering his face, expecting a flood of sunlight. Spike leapt up to the opening and pulled the beefy, gray-headed prick inside. His loud, startled cry was cut off abruptly as Spike slammed him to the concrete floor with a sickening, wet crack. The woman screamed and fled. The sound of her heavy, broad-soled feet slapping against the tile floor echoed down into the drainage space.

“Come _on_ ,” Spike ordered shoving himself through the hole. Edwards rose and entered behind him. To his relief, the room above was a windowless utility space even darker than the drain below, at once cavernous and cramped, stuffed with paraphernalia he could not identify. Spike tackled the woman, a behemoth in a white nurse’s uniform, snapped her neck and grinned. Edwards stared at him in mute, terrified anger. Their presence beneath the school was supposed to be a secret. That scream could have brought the Slayer. It still could. “Relax,” Spike said, guessing his thoughts. “She’ll tell no more tales. Look at the size of her, though,” he added thoughtfully. “We could fill that tub in no time we catch a few more whoppers like this.”

“They have to be virgins,” Edwards reminded him. Spike apprised the doughy nurse skeptically. Forty if she was a day. Over such a span, someone had surely found her mountable.

“Have a look at her old twat anyway,” he said with a shrug. “Never hurts to be sure.”

~~~~

Willow spent most of the afternoon at the mall shopping with what she chose to pretend were her credit cards, trying to make herself feel better, feeling worse and worse. When she got home, the door was unlocked. She was sure she had locked it. She heard a familiar voice from the kitchen. Amy! She had the cadence of ordinary rather than magical speech, with long pauses at irregular intervals. On the phone, obviously, but to whom? Willow entered through the archway from the dining room. “What are you doing here?” She asked.

“Saving your ass,” Amy hissed, putting a hand over the mouthpiece, then turning her attention back to the phone, “Yes, well, that’s not surprising,” She listened for a moment. “I understand that, Tom,” she continued, “and it’s not that I don’t appreciate your efforts, but you know I’ve always had a strong commitment to public education... I’m sure it is a good school, Tom, but class based parallel systems of education undermine the cohesion of a democratic civilization, to say nothing of the contribution of social stratification to the support of sexual oppression. I’m not calling you _anything_ Tom! It’s structural.... I know it was my idea.... I let myself fall into the trap of reactive discipline.”

Suddenly, Willow realized what was happening. But why would Tom Kaminski of all people be fooled by it? To be sure, Amy’s word choices, her arguments, her sentiments were in perfect imitation of Sheila Rosenberg, but the voice was unmistakable Amy Madison. Wasn’t it? “Well, just fax it directly to Sunnydale High, I’m sure they can take care of it.” Amy concluded. “Yes, of course, Tom, thanks for everything. My love to Ruth and the kids. Alright,” she said, hanging up at last, “how did you know it was me?”

“What do you mean?” Willow asked, “I’m looking right at you.”

“But you actually _see_ me?” Amy asked disappointedly, “You actually hear _my_ voice?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Willow asked. And the second before Amy began to explain, realization dawned. The skin on Willow’s neck felt like it was literally creeping, like it might actually crawl away. When she looked at Amy she saw... Amy. But if anyone else happened to walk into the room, they would find Willow there with her mother. The idea was disturbing, not just because she was seeing Amy, but because of the _way_ she was seeing Amy. It must be some residual effect from the Willard spell, Willow reasoned with herself, or of the thing they had had to do to cast it, it would wear off. But it didn’t feel like it. It felt like… something else.

Amy was beautiful of course. She’d always know that. Even as a chubby twelve-year-old there had been... something about her, especially her eyes. Her skin had always been soft. Her lips had always been full and red and perfect foils to her lovely smile. But the way Willard had looked into those eyes, had touched that skin, had kissed those lips... It touched something new in Willow’s soul; something new that was, paradoxically, something old. Basic. Eternal.

‘But she’s a girl!’ that same panicked little voice in Willow’s mind squeakily repeated. ‘Yes,’ said the much calmer, stronger voice, just as before, ‘exactly!’ Dear God, what did it _mean_? It was one thing to have temporary gay boy feeling for Xander when she was... not herself. The way her familiar, female flesh longed for the touch of Amy’s hands was something else altogether. But whatever it was, Willow told herself, it didn’t change anything. It didn’t change how she felt about Oz. “Amy,” she said miserably, “We need to talk.”

~~~~

“Could be a lesbian,” Spike ruminated, staring up at the massive alabaster nakedness of Ruth Greenly. She was suspended upside down from the ceiling, blood dripping from her throat, like a kosher butcher’s cow, enough to fill nearly a tenth of the basin, about fourteen pints to the average high school girl’s eight or nine. “Do lesbians count as virgins Dru?” Spike asked.

Drusilla looked up from her work, feeding the scarred and swaddled Angel some of the old man’s blood through a straw. “A flower’s not a mandolin,” she said, shaking her head at the need to explain something so obvious and simple, “if you strum it, you don’t pluck it.” Spike shrugged. What was the worst that could happen? The ritual wouldn’t work? Fine. He was starting to get his strength back, to feel like himself again. The balance of power between him and Dru was shifting. Soon, he’d be back on top. If he could just get her to let go of Angel.

“Eww!” whined a pigtailed little bitch-urchin. To Ryan of course, their little shit master. “They’re talking about sex again!”

“So fucking what?” Spike scoffed. “Why don’t you beat it so we can do more than talk.”

~~~~

“So what your basically saying is that we can’t be together _because_ you’re attracted to me?” Amy summarized scornfully.

“No,” Willow whined, “that’s not what I’m saying at all,” though she had to admit, reviewing what she had actually said, it was pretty close. “I’m saying I can’t be with you because I’m in love with Oz, and because _you’re_ not attracted to _me_ , unless I’m a guy!”

“Well of course not, why would I—Oh. Oh wow,” Amy laughed harshly. “That’s just too much, a _lesbian_ in love with a guy! Of course, why not! I mean, anyone would rather have anyone else but me for anything right! I mean hey, you’ve got your old school and your old friends and your old life back, what do you need me for right?”

“Amy,” Willow said, begging her with her eyes to understand. “I need you, of course I need you. I know how much you’ve done for me, with magic and everything else. You’re my _friend_ , and I need you to be my friend. Just… please don’t be mad at me, alright?”

“Alright,” Amy said, calmer but still a little sulky, “on one condition.”

“Of course,” Willow assured her, “anything you want.”

Amy’s pout gave way to a look of nervous, sneaking triumph. “I want Willard to come with me Friday night,” she said, “to the Sadie Hawkins Dance.” Amy’s triumphant look faltered a little as Willow took much too long a moment to respond. Anger and self-doubt crept into her eyes around the edges.

Knowing too well where those emotions came from and how they felt, Willow was overcome with guilt. “Okay,” she agreed. “But this has to be the very last time.”

~~~~

♫ ...The way you love. ♪

♫.......Have you got a name for it? ♪

♫..........Cause I don’t understand it♪

♫..............Language is an annoying necessity♪

♫...................And I depend on all the regular things...♪

Cordelia sat on the familiar couch in the familiar club, listing to the familiar lame, depressing music and struggling with a very unfamiliar feeling of helplessness. She ran her fingers absently through the head of hair in her lap. Physically, it was attached to Xander, but in every way that mattered he was very far away. His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t asleep, just shutting out the world, including her.

He had come to her house directly from the hospital, as he should have. He had brought her flowers, as he should have, apologized as, he should have, and for a moment Cordelia had felt triumph and relief. She had made him bring her here to celebrate. But celebration had proved premature. Whatever had been wrong between them was still wrong. It was very wrong, and caused by something Cordelia didn’t know, understand or control.

Usually, when that happened in a relationship, Cordelia knew it was time to make a dramatic exit. Especially if the sex was gone. But this was different. This was Xander. Even with Devon to keep her company through the first half of it, last night had been a week long without him. She couldn’t live like that, or at least, she didn’t want to.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” she said, her tone perfectly casual, “We should go to that dance on Friday after all.”

Xander opened his eyes. “The Sadie Hawkins Dance? I thought we were boycotting.”

“I changed my mind,” she said, “I’m the girl. That’s allowed.”

“I’ll go if you want,” he said, sitting up, “I just really don’t get why. I mean, yesterday you agreed with me that guys should be guys and girls should be girls. Life has rules and borders and an end zone. Otherwise, chaos.”

“Oh, relax,” she teased, ignoring the fact that he had thoughtlessly assumed her ‘agreement’, ignoring the fact that he was thinking (once again) less of her than of Willow, ignoring her persistent, but (she kept telling herself) irrational feeling that something had happened between him and Buffy’s mom, “I’ll still let you pay for the tickets.”

“You’re all heart,” he said a little too acidicly.

That was enough. More than. “You want me to pay for the tickets?” Cordelia demanded. “Fine! I’ll pay for the damn tickets! It’s not like you’ll even know we’re there anyway! You’ll be too busy wishing you were with Buffy or some _un_ reasonable facsimile thereof! I mean, oh my God! How tragic for you that you had to settle for a bitch like me just days before your one narrow window of opportunity when the Great and Incomparable Buffy was knocked down from on high and finally alone and vulnerable enough that she probably would have let even you fuck her!” With that she stormed out on him for the second time in twenty-four hours.

This time he followed, catching up with her in the street out front. There were people watching, listening. He ignored them. “Alright!” he shouted. “I already surrendered, now I give up! I’ve been apologizing for days without having the slightest clue what I did to piss you off and obviously I’m too STUPID to ever figure it out, so why don’t you just tell me already so that I can understand exactly how you’re right as usual and I’m wrong like always and it’s all _my_ fault that you have to ‘touch base’ with Devon to make sure you’re not left without an interim boyfriend and have to go _another_ week without sex if we break up!”

Slowly, Cordelia turned and glared at him. If fire didn’t literally flash in her eyes, you could certainly smell the smoke when she said, “So, you couldn’t call me last night, but you found the time to call Willow and talk about me behind my back.”

“No,” Xander said. “Willow actually kept your not-exactly-a-secret because she thinks you’re her _friend_. See she doesn’t know you pounced at the first opportunity to tell anyone who would listen your big dramatic gossip about her! But _Amy_ told me the truth!”

Cordelia snorted, shaking her head. ‘That’d be a first’ she thought, but it was hardly worth saying. “You want to know why I’m pissed at you?” she demanded instead. “This, right here, is why I’m pissed at you! I mean, would it kill you? Do you think you would physically die if whenever some random girl contradicts me you would just automatically take my side?”

“ _Take_ your side?” Xander scoffed, “Cordelia, I _am_ your side!”

“Well you didn’t used to be!” Cordelia shouted. “Three weeks ago, I had a life. I had friends. Hell, I had followers! People looked up to me. To _me_ , Xander! And I spit in their faces. They all hate me now. Because of YOU! They all think I’m a fool, and I’m starting to agree with them! I traded it all to be with you, and I thought it was _cheap_! Because I got what I wanted, what I chose. But I didn’t choose this! I don’t want to be your witless foil. I don’t want to be your punching bag. I don’t want to be the reformed ex-bitch who gets to grow and change and appreciate your oh so superior values. And I don’t want to be the girl you fool around with when you’re not too busy jerking off over Buffy and Willow or fucking Joyce Summers!”

The words hung in the air, making Cordelia sick with regret. Speaking her accusation aloud made her suddenly aware of how absurd it was. For the first time in her life, she truly wanted to apologize. She waited, looking into his anguished eyes, a second, two, three, four for him to deny it, to express how much her words hurt so that she could repent and be forgiven. “I’m sorry,” Xander mumbled, breaking eye contact. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”

A moment passed, a moment not of time but eternity. The shocked murmuring of others was a mere backdrop the silence between them. “Yeah,” Cordelia said icily, “I do.”

 


End file.
